Materials on display for musical "Rappahannock County"

Rappahannock County, a new musical theater piece about life during the Civil War, will be performed tonight and tomorrow night at McCullough Theater at The University of Texas at Austin. The Ricky Ian Gordon-Mark Campbell work was co-commissioned by Texas Performing Arts to commemorate the 150th anniversary of the American Civil War and draws from diaries, letters, and personal accounts to explore the war’s impact, from secession to defeat, on a community of Virginians.

In honor of the work’s Texas premiere, Civil War-era documents from the Ransom Center will be on display in the Center’s lobby through October 2.

On display is an early edition of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin and scripts from the first stage-production of the play based on her novel. Both the book and the stage adaptions are credited with fueling the abolitionist cause of the 1850s.

Other artifacts on display include an original Timothy H. O’Sullivan photograph of Civil War Casualties, Field Where General Reynolds Fell, Gettysburg, July 1863; letters to the American poet Walt Whitman from grateful Union and Confederate soldiers whom Whitman visited and nursed in field hospitals; Abraham Lincoln campaign pins and memorial buttons; and documents relating to the production of the film Gone With The Wind (1939), including the “Burning of Atlanta” storyboard.