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After the Civil War, whites' portrayals of African-Americans in Franklin County often harkened back to imagery of the antebellum South, rather than to the multi-racial alliance that had defeated the South militarily. Such historical amnesia contrasted with African-Americans' own, vivid memories or commemoration of the war and its legacies. This section presents advertising devices and other images, as well as texts.
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In the "Diamond," Chambersburg's central street-intersection, area residents debated, installed, and periodically revised outdoor commemoration of the Civil War. This section presents photographs of that commemoration's physical products--monuments, plaques, and other devices--still standing in the Diamond today.
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A Franklin County sender mailed this souvenir viewfolder, containing 22 colorized photographs of Chambersburg scenes, to a California recipient in 1921. Revealing little about the Civil War at first glance, the number and subjects of the views in this folder, taken together, actually offer a unique estimate of the degree to which the war's collective memory composed Chambersburg's self-image in the early twentieth-century. This section presents the complete viewfolder, showing the proportion of photographs related to the Civil War to those unrelated to that conflict.
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In the 1960's, most of the souvenir tokens, calendars, and other items presented in this section helped mark the 100th-year anniversaries of Civil War events. A survey of some of these commemorative devices, issued by historical committees or business firms in the Franklin County towns of Chambersburg and Waynesboro, reveals a tension between adopting a reconciliationist tone that stressed postwar North-South harmony and a harsher tone that stressed the wartime traumas that Franklin civilians suffered at the hands of Confederate soldiers.
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Around 1975, the Civil War landscape of Chambersburg found representation in a mass-marketed, miniature diorama of Confederate troops menacing a locomotive in the town's railroad roundhouse. This section presents images of the completed diorama, some of its component parts, and accompanying literature. The process of assembling the kit's locomotive model and miniature roundhouse simulated actual historical research, in a faux, "wartime" newspaper, as well as simulating actual locomotive-fabrication and roundhouse-construction.
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