Message:

<p>[QUOTE=&quot;Sarah Montgomery, post: 424975, member: 9037&quot;][ATTACH=full]148590[/ATTACH] </p><p>James Edward Lyne is my G-g-grandfather (1848-1930). He made a lot of these canes because he cut them from his backyard - which was on the Seven Pines Battlefield so he wasn&#039;t exactly lying about that. And he probably sold them for $2 at the time. They sell for $500-800 now and I&#039;ve been trying to get one for years. In fact I bid on another one this morning. He would be absolutely tickled that people pay so much for them because he was such a con man.</p><p><br /></p><p>The dates, numbers and sometimes generals names ARE wrong - he made these for several other battles as well and he just made things up.&nbsp; He never served during the Civil War - he was 13 when the war started, his stepfather, Andrew Dornauf, died in 1862 leaving him with his mother and 2 half-sisters aged 2 months and 1 year to support. Every time he ran away to join the Confederate army (and lie about his age) his mother would drag him home again. So he may have managed to get enlisted but he never made it to a battlefield until well after the war was over. His fixation with joining the Confederates is interesting because if my genealogy research is correct his grandfather and g-grandmother were mulatto slaves freed in 1804.</p><p><br /></p><p>Depending on the visitors to the battlefield he would claim to be both Union and Confederate. In the mornings he would go out wit[FLOAT_LEFT][/FLOAT_LEFT]h a musket and shoot Minni balls into the trees around the battlefield, then give tours later telling people, &quot;If you know where to look you can still find bullets out here,&quot; pull out his pocket knife, dig out the Minni balls he&#039;d put there that morning and give it to them as a souvenir. He also had a big rock that propped the door of his curio shop open that he would tell people was the rock John Smith got his head bashed in on.</p><p><br /></p><p>He was part of the group responsible for relocating the bodies from the battlefield to a local cemetery and it appears that most of the items in his shop were taken from dead Union soldiers - he apparently insured that the Confederates were interred with their belonging intact. He was in the Richmond jail briefly in 1910, and I need to see if the Library of Virginia has the jail records because I wonder if it was for grave robbing.</p><p><br /></p><p>He was con artist and a teller of tall tales and good at making money off of gullible people. But he figured out a way to keep his family fed after the war and seems to have been a huge personality. His mother and wife were both strong women who owned their own businesses and his daughter, Charlotte, married a con man just like him.[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

Your name or email address:

Do you already have an account?

• No, create an account now.
• Yes, my password is:
• Forgot your password?

Stay logged in