Tavern oers watercolor collection Union soldier/mapmaker Robert Knox Sneden’s works are now on display
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Jim Ridolphi for The Local
Robert Sneden’s Images From Hanover County collection is on display at Hanover Tavern through September.
used newspaper articles and other drawings and took them and turned them in to watercolors,� Deal said.
The Tavern is always looking for noteworthy Civil War exhibits pertaining to Hanover County.
see TAVERN, pg. 8
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anover Tavern has become the home of a collection of unique Civil War images by Union soldier and mapmaker Robert Sneden. Robert Knox Sneden’s Images from Hanover County opened last month and runs through September at the Tavern. “It’s a very nice and unique collection,� said David Deal, executive director of the Hanover Tavern Foundation. Sneden, a Canadian, joined the Union Army in a New York unit, and marched south in General George McClellan’s Peninsula Campaign in 1862. Many of the 25 images are the result of his mapmaking and draftsman duties on that campaign. “A lot of what he’s drawn, he never even saw,� Deal said. “He was never here in Hanover at the Courthouse or Gaines Mill, but he drew them.� The story of just how Sneden’s thousands of pages of notes and more than 900 images and maps landed at the Virginia Historical Society (VHS) is intriguing, and most of Sneden’s work was unpublished until the late twentieth century. The more than two dozen images that in some way reference Hanover County include numerous maps and watercolor images. The thoroughness of the work is evident in the numerous small junctions and villages mentioned on the maps, the majority of them produced after the war from meticulous notes. “He did some of them during the fighting, but kept making notes and sketches. After the war, he kept working and
“I came across the art work that was done by Civil War soldier Robert Sneden. After doing some research I found out the entire collection was owned by the Virginia Historical Society,� he said. The collection lay undiscovered in a safe in New England and a mini storage unit in Arizona for years until they were purchased by the VHS and delivered in suitcases in the 1990s. “The guys at the museum just went crazy because this was probably one of the greatest discoveries of unknown Civil War related arts and notes in the twentieth century,� Deal said. Of the 900 works, Hanover County images appeared in 25 of them, and those are the
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By Jim Ridolphi for The Mechanicsville Local
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July 17, 2013
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