Recruiting for Virginia
David Hunter Strother, Recruiting for Virginia, Pierre Morand Memorial, Special Collections, Library of Virginia.
Artist David Hunter Strother sketched a scene of recruitment of soldiers in Virginia. In the Potomac River valley of Virginia where he lived in the spring and summer of 1861, some men enlisted in the army to defend the United States from the Confederacy and some enlisted to defend the Confederacy from the United States. During the ensuing Civil War, Strother remained loyal to the United States.
Born on September 26, 1816, at Martinsburg, Virginia, David Hunter Strother was one of the best-known illustrators in the United States by the eve of the Civil War. In 1853 he achieved fame as "Porte Crayon" for a series of illustrated articles on Virginia published by Harper's New Monthly Magazine. He served in the Union army during the Civil War. His memoirs of the war were published in eleven installments in Harper's Monthly between June 1866 and April 1868. Strother died at Charles Town, Jefferson County, West Virginia, on March 8, 1888.