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Health & Fitness

Southern Museum Executive Director to Speak at National Civil War Museum

Dr. Richard Banz, executive director of the Southern Museum of Civil War & Locomotive History, will lecture later this month at the National Civil War Museum in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania.

Dr. Richard Banz, executive director of the Southern Museum of Civil War & Locomotive History, will lecture later this month at the National Civil War Museum in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania.

Banz will speak at 2 p.m. on March 24 about the Great Locomotive Chase. The famed Civil War episode started at 6 a.m. on April 12, 1862, in Kennesaw, Georgia, when Union spies under the leadership of James J. Andrews stole The General, a Confederate locomotive.

The event is memorialized in film, books and at the Southern Museum, a Smithsonian Institution affiliate that is home to The General.

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Union participants in the Great Locomotive Chase – also known as the Andrews Raid – were the first recipients to receive the Medal of Honor. Last April, the family of Sgt. John M. Scott, one of the Great Locomotive Chase participants, donated his Civil War-era Medal of Honor to the Southern Museum.

The medal, which was previously on loan, is part of a permanent display and will be added to the Southern Museum’s extensive collection of Andrews Raid artifacts, photos, and memorabilia which features the General as its centerpiece.

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Coinciding with Banz’s lecture, the National Civil War Museum on March 24 will display the Medals of Honor of six United States Servicemen from three wars.

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