Hey everyone, welcome to episode number 164 of our Civil War podcast.

My name is Rich.

And I'm Tracy. Hello y'all. Thanks for tuning into the podcast. With this episode we'll

continue working our way through the campaign known as the Seven Days Battles. Each of

the battles in the campaign took place just to the east of Richmond, the Confederate

Capitol. But after the last episode we realized that in that show we hadn't done a great job

of describing the area over which the action was taking place. So we want to fix that here

at the start of this episode. Exactly. And so as always we recommend that you pick up

a Civil War Atlas so you can check out a map and see where these campaigns and battles

that we talk about on the podcast took place. But we realized that you might perhaps be listening

to the podcast any time or place and it's not convenient to have your Civil War Atlas

open in front of you. Like maybe if you're driving to work or something. So you need to

picture in your mind's eye where the action is taking place. And so the layout of the

map where the Seven Days Battles took place is actually pretty simple. You can picture

in your mind's eye that Richmond is just off to the west or left. Then to the east of

Richmond just a few miles away is Mechanicsville on the north bank of the Chica harmony river.

The Battle of Mechanicsville took place on June 26th and the next day the 27th was the

Battle of Gaines' Mill and Gaines' Mill was just to the east of Mechanicsville. So both

of those battles took place on the north side of the Chica harmony. But then in the last

episode the action shifted south of the river with the Battle of Savage Station which

took place on Sunday June 29th. Savage Station by the way was a stop on the York River Railroad.

Then on the map in your mind's eye you can picture White Oak Swamp just to the south

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