A Northern photographer took this picture of Marye's Heights in May 1864, setting up his camera in front of "Federal Hill," a large white house approximately 250 yards to your left-rear. Seventeen months earlier, thousands of Union soldiers caught a glimpse of this panoramic view as they hurried past Federal Hill on their way to attack Marye's Heights.
Although streets and houses now cover the plain where thousands of soldiers died, important remnants of the Civil War landscape can still be found. Hanover Street, on your immediate left, follows the same course that it did in 1862. The canal ditch that bisected the street has been covered and paved, to make modern Kenmore Avenue, but, the abrupt bluff adjacent to the canal, which sheltered Union soldiers as they formed for their attack, is still visible in the back yard of the house directly across the intersection from you. Several nineteenth-century buildings still remain.
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