Collections : [Connecticut Museum of Culture and History]

Albert Sharp wrote detailed descriptions of his whereabouts and his battlefield experiences in 28 letters written home to family and friends from 1863-1864. With the 10th Regiment, he was present at the battles of Fredericksburg, Chancellorsville, Richmond, and Deep Bottom, Virginia where he died of his wounds. A letter dated 13 January 1863 from New Bern, NC, includes a square of velvet he took from the Gunboat Fannie. His letter dated 8 May 1864 describes the Battle of the Wilderness.

This collection was purchased at an auction in southeastern Connecticut from a family estate along with Walker’s magician’s trunk filled with his apparatus, his puppets, books on magic and ventriloquism, his clock repair kit, and broadsides advertising his performances. The trunk and its contents and the clock repair kit are in the museum collection. The broadside and books are part of the library collection and a photographic portrait of Albert went to graphics. Albert kept a regular diary from 1856-1895, with a few missing individual volumes. In the diaries he recorded the weather, his activities such as farming, making flatware and stripping tobacco, attending or playing his fiddle for dances, fights with his father, birth, marriages and deaths in town, and comments on local politics, fires and explosions, and national events such as the death of Abraham Lincoln. The name William Griswold appears frequently in his entries before 1865, but his role in Albert’s life is not yet illuminated. The diaries after 1867 are only sparsely filled and give the impression that he eventually assumed the role of gentleman farmer. A partial transcript of the diaries is available in the collection file in the archivist’s office.