I'll sadly admit that my main connection to the telegraph during the Civil War was the fact that armies strung telegraph wire between trees as what we might today describe as a form of military barbed wire. If there was telegraph wire it would make sense that there were telegraph operators. Interesting read to give me more background. Thanks!

This post reminded me of something I submitted to the TPS Network a couple of years ago.  I'll just include it here and it may give others some good resources to use in conjunction with study of the Union Telegraph Corps.:

I would like to make people aware of some wonderful new teaching materials being developed in a collaboration with The Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens, North Carolina State University, The National Archives, The University of Minnesota, and The Papers of Abraham Lincoln.  It is called Decoding the Civil War.  About 2012 The Huntington Library in San Marino California was able to acquire the entire collection of telegraphic correspondence for The Union during The Civil War.  This is the collection of the lead telegrapher Thomas T. Eckert.  Through a collaboration with the crowdsourcing website Zooniverse the first step is to open the collections up to citizen historians to help transcribe and ultimately decode the thousands of messages in the collections.  Units of study are being built around these telegraph messages and other primary source documents to help teachers bring these documents and this part of The Civil War to students in the classroom.  These lessons contain primary source documents from The Library of Congress.  I invite you to take a look at what is available and share with others who you know will be interested in this material.  I am including the links here.  Have some fun on Zooniverse helping to transcribe some of the telegraph messages yourself.  For me it has been a way of looking directly into The Civil War in a form that I have not experienced before.  I welcome any feedback, correspondence, or thoughts on this material and the lessons.  I am excited to see how student work with and react to these materials.  Please feel free to contact me about any questions or comments you have about these resources.

Wall Street Journal Article

http://www.wsj.com/article_email/heres-your-chance-to-decode-president-lincolns-secret-messages-1466544288-lMyQjAxMTA2NzI1MTcyOTE4Wj

Decoding the Civil War:  Zooniverse Website

https://www.zooniverse.org/projects/zooniverse/decoding-the-civil-war

C3 Teachers:  Decoding the Civil War

http://www.c3teachers.org/decoding/

On March 21 I will be attending an Educator Night at the Huntington about this work.  It will be facilitated by John Lee from North Carolina State University.  He helped put these materials together and he is also one of the writers of the C3 Framework.  Please feel free to contact me with any questions or comments.

Thanks!