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History's in The Cards For Civil War Buff
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History's in the cards for civil war buff
Wherever he goes, 11-year-old Adam Webb looks for Civil War artifacts to collect. In his bedroom, he displays 150-year-old Civil War items, including buttons and bullets. He also has a collection of books about the war. He sketches pictures of Civil War heroes and uses Lincoln Logs to build replicas of homes from the 1800s.
"I love learning about the history of the Civil War," says the fifth-grader. Growing up in Manassas, Va., where the first and second Bull Run battles were fought, he has been surrounded by Civil War history his entire life.
Another treasure that Adam keeps in his room is a set of 189 trading cards from Civil War-related national parks in the Eastern United States. The National Park Service created the cards to mark the 150th anniversary of the war. Since he collected his first card in the summer of 2011, Adam has visited many national parks in pursuit of collecting all of the cards.
It started on the way home from a baseball tournament in North Carolina, when he and his dad stopped at the Fredericksburg & Spotsylvania National Military Park in Virginia. "A ranger handed me a card. I thought it was pretty cool, and if there were more cards, I wanted some."
Since that day, Adam has traveled as far north as Boston to collect cards.
Adam loves to read facts on the back of the cards and look at the historic pictures. The cards provide lots of information, including names and birthdays of Civil War heroes. They also list dates, places and facts.
In November, National Park Service rangers recognized Adam's efforts to collect all the Civil War trading cards. At a ceremony on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, they gave him the two cards he needed to complete his set: the Lincoln Memorial and the Grant Memorial.
Would Adam ever consider trading them?
"No, ma'am," he says. "I love the Civil War. It's been a lot of hard work to get those cards. I've gone all over. They mean too much to me to ever trade them."
First Published January 14, 2013 12:00 am
