“Now is the Time of Our Country’s Need”: Geneva and the Civil War
On the 150th anniversary of the war’s end, the exhibit Geneva and the Civil War examines how the civil war affected Geneva in the 1860s, and how it impacted the community long after the battles were over. The exhibit sets the stage with the state and local politics at the war’s start in 1861 and an exploration of what Geneva was like at that time. It looks at how troops were raised from New York State, what the prominent units from Geneva were, and how soldiers described their experiences in their own words. The local impact is illustrated by the ways in which families and the village fared with so many men away and by the war of words between two newspapers, the Democratic Geneva Gazette and the Republican Geneva Courier. The exhibit closes with examples of how the Civil War shaped local and national culture in ways of which we are unaware (June 2015 to April 2016).