Talk:Battle of Brown's Ferry

separate article or merge

I started this article but am more or less indifferent if it is to be separate or merged with Battle of Wauhatchie or another Chattanooga Campaign article. At Battle of Wauhatchie another author removed bolded mention of this battle name at the top, conveying that Wauhatchie is different. If they were to be recombined, then some disambiguation at the top of Wauhatchie article is needed. This should not be redirected if there is no hatnote or bolded mention of this battle, in a target, IMO. doncram (talk) 17:25, 29 September 2009 (UTC)

After I saw the stub for Brown's Ferry, Tennessee, then found this article, I searched Wikipedia for existing articles and found that the action at Brown's Ferry was covered pretty thoroughly at Battle of Wauhatchie#Brown's Ferry operation, so I redirected this article to Battle of Wauhatchie. I may have been mistaken in my edit note, in which I said that was an alternate name for the battle, but I see that the National Park Service says[1] that Battle of Brown's Ferry is an alternative name for the Battle of Wauhatchie. My apologies if my edit note was misleading. Regardless of the name, I think that the other article provides much better coverage of the October 26-27 Brown's Ferry operation and its context than the current article does. I don't think a merger is appropriate, as the other article is better than this one. --Orlady (talk) 16:03, 30 September 2009 (UTC)

I think you misunderstood me; i was referring to this edit at the target, removing what would serve as explanation of a redirect from "Battle of Brown's Ferry" to that article. doncram (talk) 16:52, 30 September 2009 (UTC)

Well, I think my redirection and edit summary set something off... Interestingly, the user who removed the alternate name from Battle of Wauhatchie is the same user who had first inserted it there in this diff from 2005. --Orlady (talk) 17:03, 30 September 2009 (UTC)

I had only started a stub article; where i was coming from was the Brown's Ferry disambiguation page which i had created; your finding the Wauhatchie article with its bolded "Brown's Ferry" mention there was a help. I would have been fine with the redirect if bolded Battle of Brown's Ferry, which i added, stayed at the target. But, on further consideration, it seems the Brown's Ferry engagement was not part of the Wauhatchie one: it was actually different troops, different days, different location. Instead, it would seem better to redirect to an appropriate point in the Chattanooga Campaign article. The organization there is:

    * 1 Background
    * 2 Opposing forces
    * 3 Opening the Cracker Line
    * 4 Wauhatchie
    * 5 Longstreet departs
    * 6 Preparations for battle
    * 7 The Battles for Chattanooga
          o 7.1 Orchard Knob
          o 7.2 Lookout Mountain
          o 7.3 Missionary Ridge
          o 7.4 Rossville Gap
    * 8 Retreat and pursuit
    * 9 Aftermath
    * 10 References
    * 11 Notes
    * 12 Further reading
    * 13 External links

I wonder if headers there could be revised to include "Brown's Ferry" before "Wauhatchie" as a section or subsection. The Wauhatchie section has a "main" article link to the separate Battle of Wauhatchie article; a Brown's Ferry section would not need that; this could then redirect to there. Or should this redirect to "Opening the Cracker Line" with no header change there. But then for this to be a redirect, i would think Battle of Brown's Ferry should appear somewhere there. doncram (talk) 21:43, 30 September 2009 (UTC)

Well, Brown's Ferry and Wauhatchie are at most 4 miles apart within Lookout Valley, most of the "Wauhatchie" action actually happened nearer to the ferry than to Wauhatchie and was related to setting up the Cracker Line, and the fighting occurred on successive days, so there's plenty of logic for combining them. In contrast, the main battles for Chattanooga were nearly a month later and in distinctly separate locations (Lookout Mountain may be adjacent to Lookout Valley but the elevation difference is huge). Regardless, I'm no Civil War buff, but the person who edited the Wauhatchie article lead is, so it's time to ask him here -- to explain what he had in mind and to sort things out. I'll go do that. --Orlady (talk) 01:54, 1 October 2009 (UTC)

Folks, I'm sorry about the confusion that I seem to have caused. Occasionally I do something and people look up edit histories and find that I am simply reverting something that I did myself four or five years ago. All I can do to explain that is to plead the vagaries of advancing mental age. :-) I was not aware of this article about Brown's Ferry, so did not see the discussion. The problem -- which is not a very large one -- is that the NPS article is inconsistent. The dates shown (Oct 28-29) are for the battle of Wauhatchie, not the activities by a completely different corps the previous day at Brown's Ferry, even though they are obviously related. (The way I would choose to understand this inconsistency is to suggest that the American Battlefield Protection Program and the Civil War Sites Advisory Commission did not want to have a separate battlefield classification for Brown's Ferry, so they lumped the two together and were not careful about the dates.) The way I chose to portray it in both the battle and campaign articles was to describe the river crossing and the minor fighting in the gap above Brown's Ferry as part of the background to the main action the following night at Wauhatchie. One way to address this situation is to restore the alternative names to the lead section and to use a footnote on the dates in the information box. The other is to have a separate article about Brown's Ferry. I don't have strong feelings either way. Hal Jespersen (talk) 16:02, 1 October 2009 (UTC)

Hi Hal, thanks for chiming in. I think it is appropriate in an article about Wauhatchie to recap the action at Brown's Ferry, but while both are part of the larger Chattanooga Campaign, neither is part of the other. Supporting that, the historic map included in the Wauhatchie article is very clear about its dates, which exclude the action at Brown's Ferry. So I think a redirect to a point in the Chattanooga Campaign article, or a separate article on the Battle of Brown's Ferry is more appropriate. Currently the most complete and accurate wikipedia information about the Brown's Ferry action is in the Chattanooga Campaign article, although it is not written to conveniently to allow a redirect (like to a section named "Battle of Brown's Ferry"). My apologies, but the info in the Battle of Brown's Ferry article right now is just placeholder stuff, not properly written and perhaps not accurate. I don't know if calling it a "Battle" is entirely justified as it may over-inflate the importance of this one action, but there exists a webpage or two calling it so, so I think it's best to set up at least a redirect. Or perhaps there is more that can be said about the Brown's Ferry action, and it should be set up now with all the info from the Chattanooga article, and marked for expansion. doncram (talk) 10:01, 2 October 2009 (UTC)

One possible resolution is to merge this article into Brown's Ferry, Tennessee, which is also very brief. It is possible to point into the campaign article using the link Chattanooga Campaign#Opening the Cracker Line. Although I would not object, I do not think it would be very useful to have another, deeper subheading called Brown's Ferry for only a single paragraph. Hal Jespersen (talk) 14:53, 2 October 2009 (UTC)

I do not support the idea of redirecting this page to Chattanooga Campaign, either with the current structure of that article or with a new section. This was a relatively small engagement in the overall campaign. However, since both Battle of Wauhatchie and Chattanooga Campaign currently have more information about this skirmish than this article does, it seems to me that it would make sense to copy (not move) the relevant information into this article. I say "copy (not move)" because the information is still relevant to those articles as context/part of the story. --Orlady (talk) 18:38, 2 October 2009 (UTC)

I think we're all agreeing that the action was relatively small and that we don't want inflated emphasis on this in the other articles. It seems to me that the points made are backing us into keeping this Battle of Brown's Ferry as a separate article on the minor battle that it was. There is also some different info about the Brown's Ferry action, such as factoid that there were 52 pontoon-boats used in the landing, in the http://ngeorgia.com/history/brownsferry.html webpage. That webpage seems a tad promotional and is not itself a scholarly article (note it does not itself give any bibliography of its sources), but I assume there exist more fundamental sources describing the action which would support the 52 pontoons factoid and more detail. A Google books search on Brown's Ferry Tennessee yields some hits, including an interesting map of Brown's Ferry by Ambrose Bierce in 1863 which must be in the public domain. doncram (talk) 19:22, 2 October 2009 (UTC)