some of these authors have a will be appearing on booktv. you can watch them on our website, booktv.org. often i think of the beautiful town that is seated by the sea and often in fossil up-and-down the pleasant streets of that town and my youth comes back to me. welcome to portland, maine, on booktv. located on a peninsula, it was the original capital of maine and started as a fishing and trading village. today it s the largest city in the state with a population of about 66,000. it still has strong ties to its maritime history with lobstering and tourism in its largest economic drivers. with help of our spectrum cable partners for the next 90 minutes will feature the areas history and literary community. whitney kent are special feature on portland with a history of lobstering industry. we begin our special feature. over here is my gps and radar. so and thought it helps us figure out where we are. i don t mark my traps with the gps. i i kind of do it by feel. lo
really just sort of scratched the surface out here, and there s a lot more information potential with this site. it s very unique, particularly for this area, the mid-atlantic region. you don t typically see slavery being practiced on the scale that it was being practiced here at leramie taj. i think i mentioned that 90 slaves is roughly 10 times the number of enslaved individuals you would have expected to be living here. so that s an extremely unusual circumstance for this area. you know, like i said, they are about 20 x 34 feet. that s just under 700 square feet of living space. if in fact there were only six structures total, one can assume there were somewhere between maybe as many as 12 or 15 people living in each these dwelling houses which probably sounds like a lot, so i i would i would guess or assume that these may have been extended family units, for example, living together. multiple generations of families. like i say, these are pretty utilitarian, simple, e
of the union army, and he blocked general lee s line of retreat, thus general lee had to continue further west, searching for rations and hoping to get around grant s army. the next place general lee could gather supplies was about three miles from us here at appomattox station. supplies had been brought over from lynchburg to feed general lee s army. it s everything the army really needed. hundreds of thousands of rations, new uniforms, equipment, and that s where they re heading for on april 8 after leaving cumberland church on the night of april 7. general lee s advance is led by confederate reserve artillery under general reuben lindsey walker. they go to camp about a mile from appomattox station about two miles from here on the afternoon of april 8th. and general custer s cavalry advances on that station and captures the supplies, then encounters general reuben lindsey walkers s general artillery and fight for about four hours the ball-of-p at mattox station. a very uniq
general grant s staff, there was a young captain named robert lincoln on his staff, and he, of course, was the son of president abraham lincoln, and he was here in the room. another interesting participant in this ceremony was at least, maybe not participant, but a witness to this ceremony was this rag doll of lula mclean, youngest daughter of wilmer mclean. it was sitting on the couch when the officers came in, and they moved it to the mantel during the meeting. after the meeting, some of the officers took the doll off the mantel and began tossing it around. captain thomas moore of general phillip sheridan s staff took the doll home with him as a war souvenir. in the 1990s, the family wanted the doll to come back to appomattox court house, and it is now on display in the park visitors center. the meeting lasted about an hour and a half. it was said to be a gentleman s agreement. general grant was very generous with the terms. in the end when general lee said he had nothing