Where heroes would tread

Company offers tour of Northeastern war

TRENTON, N.J. (RWN) "Step here, brother," Terry Dean says, "but step softly. You are walking on sacred ground."

We're outside the former state capital of New Jersey, its dome crumbling, its white walls scorched. The lawn leading up to it is rolling - a hill means a grave, Dean says.

And he should know. As the owner of Martyrs Tours of Philadelphia, Dean has established himself as one of the leading sources of information on the civil war.

"I fought in this campaign," Dean says, "where we fought for every strip mall, where toll booths were traps, where horrible atrocities happened on both sides. I enlisted in Philadelphia and fought in that hell that was the Battle of Newark, and all the way up to Newark. I think people should see this country was built upon the blood of my brothers."

The tours -- $400 a day, all meals and lodging included - have become wildly popular, averaging more than 20 people a trip, leaving once every 10 days.

"This is a way for people to really understand what the war was like. Unless you were living in a border region and experienced it, the civil war was abstract. Here, you see what happened at the Battle of the Statehouse."

At the Battle of the Statehouse, Bible Belt forces under Lt. Col. Anthony Holloway held out for 12 days against the I.S. Army. On the twelfth day, the Islamic commander sent a note to Holloway: "Surrender now and leave with your lives. You must be low on ammunition, and we are rich with it. Come join us and be brothers. Do not, and you will die."

Less than 30 minutes after Holloway received the note, the statehouse burst into flames from the inside, a massive explosion ripping through the building's dome. The Bible Belt soldiers, out of ammunition but still with plenty of explosives, set the entire building on fire. More than 400 soldiers died in the building. More than 1,000 Islamic soldiers were killed in attacks during the siege.

"We walk around here and I tell them 'Well, this squad moved over here and took fire over here, and my squad took fire over here.' Sometimes I run into vets from a battle, and we talk about what they saw and did.'"

The capstone of every tour is the Battle of Newark. The Battle was the decisive battle in the war, with more than 500,000 dead, most of them civilians, in brutal house-to-house fighting. After Newark, neither side could afford the casualties and a truce was signed.

Dean's tour of Newark takes two full days and starts in a suburb of Livingston, where the first skirmish happened between dismounted mechanized infantry. It progresses down Interstate 280, Dean reading survivor's excerpts of what it was like drive through the Ramapo Mountains and be shot at from either side. A full day is spent in the city itself, going from monument to monument.

The tour ends at the Martyrs Monument along Newark Bay, where tourists can stand see the shattered remains of New York City.


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