What does the search for the Ivory-billed woodpecker have to do with the Civil War?

In 1859, a young man graduated from the University of Louisiana with a degree of Doctor of Medicine. He moved his North Carolina family to Madison Parish, Louisiana, and then came the Civil War. The family owned a plantation there, and the family name appears on an 1862-1863 map showing the names of plantation owners, abandoned plantations, roads, villages, rivers, etc.

I found the map on a website for the digital historical maps of Louisiana, coordinated by Richard P. Sevier. He notes that this Confederate military map was captured by Union forces and was probably a forerunner to the Grant’s March map. See http://www.usgwarchives.net/maps/louisiana/.

While it was wonderful to find a Civil War era map showing this family’s surname, I was puzzled and intrigued when I saw the additional note, “Courtesy of the USGS National Wetlands Research Center.”

Wetlands research? There had to be a story there, so I decided to email the National Wetlands Research Center to find out what it was.

NWRC responded that the map was discovered by a group of scientists at the National Wetlands Research Center while they were conducting research on the now extinct Ivory-billed woodpecker in the Tallulah, LA region. Their scientists acquired the map from the Watson Library at Northwestern State University of Louisiana, Natchitoches, Louisiana, who acquired the map from the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA). Scans were shared with Mr. Richard Sevier at USGenWeb and they were assembled into the map we see online. “According to the memory of those involved, this map was supposedly one of several Confederate maps captured by the Yankees during the Civil War.”

Fascinating.

So, a grateful thank you to the map’s original creator(s), thank you to whoever gave it to our wonderful National Archives, to the Watson Library archivists, to Mr. Sevier, to NWRC and thank you to all the people who value and take care of our precious national history.