I want to give anyone interested a head's up on a magnificent resource available at the West Virginia State Archives in the form of literally boxes of original materials on each Federal regiment and battery raised in or credited to West Virginia during the war, in the form of the original muster in rolls, some muster out rolls, some bi-mopnthly muster rolls, descriptive lists, and official ocrrespondence, most of it addressed to Governor Pierpont or other oifficials during during the war.

How these original documents happen to be held by the State instead of by the Federal government is unknown to me, but according to their archivists, the material had been stored in jumbled fashion in the basement, until one of the archivists made it his personal project to organize the material. For anyone studying one of the West Virginia Federal units, the material appears to me to be indispensible. I do not know how much, if any, of this materiasl is duplicated in the National Archives, but all of what is located in Charleston are original documents, and I suspect that much, if not all, of it is unavailable elsewhere.

I was looking for very specific correspondence, so I did not inspect all of the files, but what I saw indicates to me that there is a wealth of original material; there which has never seen the light of day before it was organized by the archivists.

All of this material is on Federal units, but there is also a considerable amount of manuscript material both Federal and Confederate. This is an excellent and (for me)an unexpected collection of material. There is an on-line index for the manuscript collection.