Abstract
A number of years ago Sally McMurry of the Pennsylvania State University came across an intriguing item while digging in the tax records in the basement of the Centre County Library and Historical Museum in Bellefonte, Pennsylvania. Sitting on an open metal shelf was a sheaf of papers bound in deteriorating leather. The item was twenty-seven inches long and seventeen inches wide. Curious, McMurry opened it and discovered that it contained 274 pages of information on the men who had deserted from Pennsylvania infantry, artillery, and cavalry regiments during the Civil War. Why did such a document exist? What was its purpose? And how did such an extensive federal record come to Bellefonte?