Apr 07, 2022 - Sale 2600

Sale 2600 - Lot 294

Price Realized: $ 1,125
?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 300 - $ 400
(WORLD WAR ONE.) Edward S. Vosburg. Letters from an engineer in the American Expeditionary Forces. Approximately 65 Autograph Letters Signed to parents in Phillipston, PA: 15 while in training stateside (mostly at Camp Custer, MI), 15 with the American Expeditionary Forces before the Armistice, July-November 1918; and 35 after the armistice through about June 1919; moderate wear, many marked by censors, most still folded in original postmarked envelopes. Various places, 1918-1919
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Edward Sherman Vosburg Jr. (1889-1959) enlisted from Phillipston, PA in Clarion County northeast of Pittsburgh, joining Company F of the 55th Engineers. The regiment trained at Camp Custer in Michigan, where he wrote on 8 May 1918 "There are negroes on each side of our barricks but they never bother us."

His 19 July 1918 letter announces his safe arrival in France: "You should see the French people and the way they dress, also the wooden shoes they wear. After we landed from the boat we were marching along and were singing Hail, Hail, the Gang's All Here, and the French kids started to sing it too, which shows some of the boys over here have been teaching the kids." He expressed confidence on 1 September 1918: "We are here to win the war, and the Huns are finding it out." On 2 November 1918 he boasted of his regiment's reputation: "One of the fellows was talking to a Marine the other day, and he asked what regiment we were. . . . He said, I've heard of you fellows, you broke the building record."

Vosburg's 24 November letter was written after "the censor is lifted," allowing him to summarize his movements in a 3-page letter: "We landed at Brest after a submarine scare. They claim they saw one when we came over, and the boat zig zagged all night. . . . We got on a train and came here to Gievres, which is a large engineers depot, the largest in France. Our company helped to build it. We put up more barricks and steel warehouses than any company here. There were some airoplane hangers to be built at Issondum and they sent for the best company of engineers, and the colonel of this camp recommended Co. F.. . . . While there, the war stopped. I laughed the day it finished. I told an old French woman who does washing for us boys that war was finished, and she went danceing up the road." On 27 November 1918 he wrote "It seems very queer to speak of the flu. We are in tents and in the open and have not been bothered with it." He describes the irony of an engineer regiment's work on 12 December 1918: "We have built more barricks than any company in France and lived in more tents, but our bunch can fix up a tent so it is real comfortable."

Vosburg returned safely to Phillipston after the war, and worked as a railroad engineer as his father had.