INPERSON
Carleton Young with the box that
contained 250 Civil War letters.
VOICES
FROM THE
ATTIC
A forgotten trove of Civil War
letters sheds light on the war and
family history.
BY PAUL GLASSER
S
hortly after Carleton Young found a
wooden box full of letters from two
brothers who fought in the Civil War,
he knew he had to write a book about his
discovery.
“We immediately realized this was an
amazing collection we stumbled upon,” Young
says. “We had a story to tell.”
He discovered the letters after his parents
died and he started to clean their house in
Churchill in 2004. However, it took almost
12 years to complete the project. Young selfpublished “Voices from the Attic: The Williamstown Boys in the Civil
War” late last year and it is now available on Amazon.com and Barnes
& Noble.
Young was surprised to find the letters because his parents had never
said anything about them. “At first I was quite confused,” he says. “I
had expected to be familiar with just about everything in the house in
which I had grown up.”
Young taught history at Jefferson High School for 37 years and
speculates that his parents never told him about the letters because
they didn’t know what was inside the box. He says there’s no evidence
12 724.942.0940 TO ADVERTISE | West Jefferson Hills
the box had been opened before he uncovered it. After discovering the
letters, Young put them in his sister’s garage in Dormont while he got
ready to sell his parents’ house.
After he had a chance to examine the letters, Young immediately
called his friends Edd Hale and Bill Lutz who taught history at
Keystone Oaks High School for decades. Lutz is the true Civil War
expert in the group. “I’ve been a big Civil War buff since the fifth
grade,” Lutz says. “I drove over in 15 minutes. I couldn’t believe it. I was
flabbergasted.”
The letters were well-preserved because they were written on acidfree paper and were jammed into the box so tightly that no light or air
could get in. Hale says the letters were written in red, black, blue and
green ink and the soldiers’ penmanship was beautiful.
Hale, Young and Lutz began meeting on a weekly basis to sort,
organize and transcribe the letters. Hale’s wife, Nancy, and Young’s
wife, Carole, also contributed to the effort. However, the group found
it difficult to read the documents because the letters were cross-written.
The soldiers turned a letter 90
degrees and then wrote across
their words in order to save
paper and postal fees.
Each week the group would
meet and examine one or two
letters but progress was slow.
In addition to cross-writing,
the group had to deal with
misspellings and archaic
vocabulary. For example, one
letter referred to a stoop, which
William Henry Martin
in the 19th century was a