Well There‘s Your Problem - Bonus Episode 29 PREVIEW: Frank Furness, Architect

Episode Date: March 11, 2023

it's the furness party. do attend full episode on patreon: https://www.patreon.com/posts/79877744

Well, in that vein, what gets him the Medal of Honor is the Battle of Trevelyan Station, right? I should say. Medal of Honor, not as big of a deal in the Civil War, because it was the only one the army gave you, more or less. They still had a lot of room in Arlington Cemetery back then. Well, actually, there was all the room, because Arlington Cemetery was Robert E. Lee's plantation. Yeah, that's true.

So, to make sort of a long story short here, the cavalry corps intended to cut the Virginia Central Railroad at Trevelyan Station, right? They encountered Confederate cavalry, and the fighting eventually progressed to this point where the Confederates held a farmhouse, and the Union held its outbuildings, right? The C sent a man out to crawl on hands and knees to keep out a view of the Confederates to report to Captain Furness that they were out of ammunition, and if the position fell, it might jeopardize the whole operation. So, Frank Furness, he's got this large and impressive logistical and architectural head,

and he decided to use his head, right? Which is, what if he put the box of ammo on his head and just sprinted over there? Yeah, just going to take the thing that explodes, put it as close as possible in my head, just give it a shot. That's going to be a heavy box of ammunition, too. Yes. So, he and Captain Walsh Mitchell both grabbed the box of ammo and just did that. They just sprinted over, gave him the ammo.

Then they sprinted back. We don't know what the Confederates thought of this, but they were confused and surprised enough that when they did the first pass, there wasn't that much gunfire. It's like, what are these idiots doing? They're officers. Just imagine calling time out on the battlefield. On our way back, they got shot at a whole lot more. Someone managed to put a bullet through Walsh Mitchell's hat.

The only way that makes sense to me, if it's cavalry, it makes sense to me that that's like a hardy hat, so it's like a big fucking cowboy hat looking thing. That's pretty prominent, too. It's got a gold cord on it and everything. She's the most prominent target imaginable. So anyway, this is one of the most incredibly stupid things imaginable, and it worked flawlessly. They were able to hold the position. They love military history.

You just get to the history of the engagement, and then this guy, sort of blue link with a named person, decided to go off. Yeah, fuck it, let's do it. Yeah, this is widely regarded. That was a suicide mission. There's no chance that it was going to work. It's very confusing. It's one of those things that you would discourage now on the basis that you're too important

to get killed for that. Ideally, you want to avoid getting killed at all, but in particular, you send a guy for that. Yeah. Right, and it's like, I think a couple different historians, but I know Mike Lewis points to this incident as like, oh no, motherfucker was trying to die out there. Every once in a while, he was just looking for an opportunity, but he failed the skill issue.

It didn't quite get himself killed. Now, in fact, didn't even get a scratch on him. So the battle itself had mixed results. I don't know if you could say Travillian Station was the victory for the Union. They did destroy the railroad, but it was back up and running in two weeks. So but also the war was like winding down. So everyone saw this was this was not going good places for the Confederates. But at this point, this is late in the war.

The original recruits for the Lancers had about three months left. They went to go fight in the Shenandoah Valley. Right. Eventually they got caught up to by Mosby's Raiders and Mosby's Raiders took out most of their supplies and then most of the records of the unit, right, which is why we don't know. Confederate cavalry. I mean, this is like Nathan Bedford Forest's shit, too, is the original recruiting base

of the first clan fucking assholes. Some of the worst war criminals in the war, incidentally, they took out most of the records and Frank Furness actually wound up at this point with a desk job in Washington, DC, trying to put those records back together. But then, you know, his term in his list meant ended October 4th, 1863, and he decided to go back to Philadelphia, trade in the Lance for the T Square Encompass. He was going to go back to architecture. It's going to return to Philadelphia.

Yeah. After some time off doing nice relaxing stuff like fighting the Civil War, he was deciding to go back to the real, the real cut and thrust of architecture. Well, he goes back, he goes back for about two years and then he spends another year at Richard Morris Hunt's Atelier before going into, like, actual private practice. That's a gap in resume, though. Yeah. Well, there's an interesting anecdote here from the Frank Furness architecture in the

Violent Mind book, which is he learned to swear at Hunt's office and then actually use that to maintain military discipline more effectively than he would have otherwise. No, that's incredible. Yeah, that book is full of just the best, the best little asides and quotes, right? Do you want to show off the next slide, Rob? Oh, yeah. Yeah. I got a picture here of the Lancers with their Lances.

Our boy Frank is right here. He was at this point captain of F Company, but this is him with I Company, which he liked better. Just doing epic troop shit, you know? Yes. And on the previous slide is actually the monument at Gettysburg that he designed for his own unit. You can see they got the Lances here.

You know, they weren't using them by that point. Oh, I mean, those are ironwork, you know? They were definitely emblematic of the troop, but the flag part of those flags is actually metal. Oh, and then, yeah, so there's that slide of the company and then that's like a Harper's illustration, just showing them all. Just like, yeah, we didn't have enough guns. We had more guns than the other guys.

Yeah. Right. And in hindsight, quite a fashionable, quite a fashionable regiment, you know? Yes. Very anachronistic. It's very fun. It's really funny. Yeah.

And so, so like, I like to think I don't know exactly what it is at some point, my favorite anachronism of the Civil War, because motherfuckers love to zoom out. And yeah, that's that's a whole story in itself. I've just had my microphone taken away by Pizza Boy. I got it back, though. He's excited to talk about Zouav. Yes. The other important thing, yeah, right.

So so Frank Furness enters the war, or I think I think on the left is a picture when he's like about 20, like maybe in the late 1850s or early 1860s. The one on the right is when he comes back and he looks like he looks like Roz after like a six week vendor. He's drunk and mad. He also has a gun now. And so and so there's all these there's all these stories that just about like what working at his office was like, right?

So he comes out of the war, he comes out of like the war in Richard Morrison's office swearing like crazy. His office was at the end of the hall and he and he had like, was it was it like a deer head or something? Or was it a target? He would shoot the far end of it for practice. There was a target on the back of the elevator shaft, I believe is the the story. He painted a target on the back of the elevator shaft and he would shoot at it when he was

annoyed. I won't say that it's sort of like national PTSD is a good thing, right? I won't say that, but it leads you to some entertaining places and tracing the trajectories of like all of these Civil War guys as they come out of the war into their new thing. Like the Civil War made Ambrose beer so goth, like it turned him into a goth girl. People really got weird with it because like after you've seen all of this shit after you've seen the sort of like horrors that prefigure World War One, you know, people's like fucking stumbling around with a gut hanging out and shit, you'd realize you can just do whatever

you want. Laws are fake and you can kill anyone who tries to stop you. Yeah, absolutely. And so Frank Furness embraced that with a plumb.