"The Rebels Are Coming!" The Department of the Monongahela During the Gettysburg Campaign

Join us when Rich Condon of Civil War Pittsburgh discusses when President-Elect Abraham Lincoln visited the City of Pittsburgh in February 1861 and lauded this section of Pennsylvania as the “banner county of the Union” - a region where he imagined if the country were threatened its citizens would willingly pick up the shovel as well as the rifle. His vision came to fruition in June 1863 as an estimated 11,000 residents contributed to the construction of 37 earthen defenses around the city in anticipation of a Confederate invasion. The U.S. War Department likewise sanctioned the creation of the Department of the Monongahela.

Rich Condon is a public historian from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania with a BA in public history from Shepherd University. For over a decade he has worked with a multitude of sites and organizations including The Battle of Franklin Trust, Soldiers & Sailors Memorial Hall and Museum, National Museum of Civil War Medicine, Harpers Ferry National Historical Park, Flight 93 National Memorial, Reconstruction Era National Historical Park, and Catoctin Mountain Park. Condon has written for Civil War Times Magazine, The American Battlefield Trust, as well as Emerging Civil War, and operates the Civil War Pittsburgh blog, which focuses on sharing stories related to western Pennsylvania’s role in the Civil War.