26 Days to Opening Day

Opening Day 2008 for the Timber Rattlers is April 3. That is 26 days from today. This off-season, the countdown will be based on books. Each day between now and Opening Day 2008, I will pick a random book out of my library and excerpt a passage off the page number corresponding with the number of days remaining to the first pitch of the new season. I will try not to repeat a book during the countdown.

Today’s book is A Brotherhood of Valor by Jeffrey D. Wert.

Harper’s Ferry, Virginia, sat at the northern boundary of the Confederate States of America. The action taken by Virginia Governor John Letcher to seize the arsenal testified to its ordnance value and its strategic importance at the gateway to the Shenandoah Valley. Through the town ran the tracks of the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad, a vital supply line for the Union government. To strengthen its defenses and to bring order to the chaos among the volunteers at the site, Letcher and the state’s military commander Major General Robert E. Lee, assigned Colonel Thomas J. Jackson to the post during the final week of April 1861.

Jackson, dressed in the blue uniform of a VMI faculty member, arrived in Harper’s Ferry on the afternoon of April 29. A few of his former students at the institute recognized their former instructor and greeted him. The colonel took a room at a small hotel and established his headquarters at the home of the armory’s superintendent. To his wife, Mary Anna, he confided that he had been given “the post which I prefer above all others…an independent command.”

Put today’s excerpt in a baseball context.