Peter Woods documentary to screen at September meeting DS VFW

Reminder about the film to be shown at next VFW meeting on the 18th of Sept.

 

 

HCHC documentary "Colonel Peter C. Woods – Country Doctor, Cavalry Officer, Public Servant"

 

The following is from the HCHC website and a March 13, 2014 article (San Marcos Mercury) about the gunboat replica and battle reenactments.

  

This is the story of Peter C. Woods, who came to San Marcos in 1851, started a cotton plantation and decided to form the 32nd Texas Volunteer Cavalry, C.S.A. during the Civil War. He was a physician who survived the war and lived the rest of his life as a country doctor and developing San Marcos and Hays County.

 

The only memorial located directly on the Courthouse grounds was erected in his honor in 1907.

 

Re-enactors were used to create the life of Col. Woods and his wife Georgia, the Civil War battles of Blair's Landing and Yellow Bayou in Louisiana, and the 32nd Cavalry attack on Union gunboats on the Red River.

 

In the most elaborate effort yet in a series of local history documentaries, the Hays County Historical Commission commissioned, and then destroyed, a full-scale replica of a Union gunboat.   The 80-foot-long wooden prop was launched in Lake Travis to recreate the battle of Blair's Landing on the Red River in which Col. Wood's 36th Texas Calvary began a five-week-long campaign in pursuit of retreating Union forces under the command General Nathaniel E. Banks. Between April 12 and May 18, 1864, the cavalry skirmished daily with the fleeing federals including intense action at Grand Ecore, Monnett's Ferry and finally Yellow Bayou, where Woods was wounded and the confederates gave up the chase (according to the Handbook of Texas History online).

 

This documentary is based on interviews with members of the Woods family, Dorothy Woods Schwartz, Clear Springs and Limestone Ledges, Janice Woods Windle, True Women and Hill Country, and historian Dr. Donald S. Frazier, Thunder Across the Swamp, along with the only published information on the 32nd Texas Cavalry and their participation in the Red River Campaign of 1864, The Dead Men Wore Boots by Laurence A. Duaine.