Cumberland Gap Friends receive grant
for production of educational video

The National Park Foundation recently presented the Friends of Cumberland Gap National Historical Park a $10,000 Impact Grant to support the development of the education DVD, The Civil War at Cumberland Gap.

The grant is part of the National Park Foundation’s Impact Grant program that gives parks financial support needed to transform innovative, yet underfunded ideas, into successful in-park programs and initiatives.

The gift provides funds for a project that will give students a more personal awareness of the people who lived during the Civil War years and the hardships they and their families endured, John Brown, the friends group chairman, said.

“The project follows three factual family or personal histories that play out on a steadily progressing timeline of the Civil War,” Brown continued. “The Cumberland Gap’s military history is necessarily part of the project, but the individual sagas of Appalachian people will be the mechanism for explaining the Civil War at the Gap.

“Specifically, through re-enactors, three stories will be conveyed: (1) the desperate and heartbreaking family struggles of Union soldier Franklin Jones who deserts while in the military hospital at Cumberland Gap; (2) the murder of a former slave known as Samuel by presumed bushwhackers is also investigated; and, (3) the unusual final military confrontation at Cumberland Gap as experienced by a young Confederate home-front soldier named Jeremiah Dean.

“These stories, superimposed over the Gap’s military activities, provide an overview of the diverse experiences and highlight the divisiveness of the war as it existed in Tennessee and throughout the country.”

Lesson plans will accompany the educational DVD and will be aligned with the National Council for the Social Studies Standards, Brown added.

The project is expected to be completed in August 2012 with the DVD being provided free of charge to teachers and home-schooled groups.