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The ’48th Pennsylvania – Entrance to Mines’ monument is at Stop Eight on the Petersburg National Battlefield Eastern Front Auto Tour. It is next to the mine entrance on the The Crater walking trail. The 48th Pennsylvania has another small monument at The Crater itself. Its main monument is about 1.2 miles south of the exit from the park on Crater Road.
Text from the monument:
Entrance
to Mines
48th Regt
Digging the mine
Lieutenant Colonel Henry Pleasants, the commander of the 48th Pennsylvania Regiment and a mining engineer before the war, had put forward the proposal to mine underneath the Confederate lines.
According to Lieutenant Colonel Pleasants’ official report, the mine “was commenced at twelve M., the 25th of June, 1864, without tools, lumber, or any of the materials requisite for such a work. The mining picks were made out of those used by our pioneers; plank I obtained, at first by tearing down a rebel bridge and afterwards by sending to a saw-mill five or six miles distant, and the material excavated was carried out in hand-barrows, constructed of cracker boxes.”
“The work progressed rapidly until the 2d of July, when it reached extremely wet ground. The timbers gave way, and the roof and the floor of the mine nearly met. I retimbered it and started again. From this point I had to excavate a stratum of marl, the consistency of which was like putty, and which caused our progress to be necessarily slow. To avoid this, I started an inclined plane, and in about one hundred feet rose thirteen and one-half feet, perpendicular.”
“As the excavation progressed the number required to carry out the earth increased, until, at last, it took nearly every enlisted man in the regiment, which consisted of nearly four hundred effective men. The whole amount of material excavated was eighteen thousand (18,000) cubic feet.”
Location of the Monument
The ’48th Pennsylvania – Entrance to Mines’ monument is at Stop Eight on the Petersburg National Battlefield Eastern Front Auto Tour.