Hey everyone, thanks for downloading episode 50 of our Civil War podcast, I'm Rich.

I'm Tracey. Hello y'all. Welcome to the podcast. We want to start off by saying that with this

show, we're going to backtrack just a bit to discuss events that happened in Eastern

Virginia in May and June 1861. Even though with our previous episodes on events in Western

Virginia, we actually went up to July already with our coverage of the Battle of Rich Mountain.

And we'll be doing this quite often throughout the course of the podcast from here on out.

And we hope that when we do this Ford and reverse Ford and reverse maneuvering with regard

to the timeline, it won't throw you guys off. But there's not really any other way to handle

the fact that we're going to be attempting to construct a single narrative of the entire

war and that narrative will be made up of different events that happened in different

places, but that often happened simultaneously. So for instance, like with the events in Western

Virginia at Philippi and at Rich Mountain, we followed that story through to July 1861.

But now to tell the story of what was happening during that same time frame in Eastern Virginia,

we need to rewind the timeline to May. So we hope that makes sense. And hopefully the way it plays out

during the course of the podcast will seem logical. But again, we think you guys are pretty smart

cookies and you would have figured all of that out even without us telling you. But we figured we

just go ahead and give you a heads up about how we'll be handling different events that happened

in different places, but that often happened at the same time. And so having said that off we go

to Eastern Virginia. On May 22nd, 1861, Frank Baker, James Townsend and Shepherd Mallory decided

the Union Army was too close not to make a run for it. And so during the day, they slipped into the

woods and laid low, waiting until darkness covered the Virginia Peninsula. As night fell, the three

men set out on the bay in a small skiff and paddled as quietly as possible. After landing near Fort

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