FOUR OAKS -- In the sandy soil of his 22 acres, Larry Laboda routinely turns up 150-year-old bullets, some of them intact, some of them fired, all of them relics of the dusty and bedraggled soldiers who once marched across his land.
Sometimes, he'll find a squashed projectile stuck in a tree, the wood still scorched after more than a century. One time, he unearthed part of a rifle barrel. Another time, a ramrod.
As a retiree living a Civil War buff's dream on the edge of Bentonville Battlefield, Laboda gets the daily thrill of knowing that thousands of men carried Spencer rifles across his corn field in 1865.
But he also enjoys this twist of history: The troops who dug earthworks in the woods behind his house came from New York, Laboda's home state - Union territory 500 miles from Johnston County.
So in February, Laboda installed a 9-foot granite obelisk to honor the 123rd Regiment of New York State volunteers - thought to be one of three Union monuments in all of North Carolina, and the only one that doesn't stand in a federal cemetery.
He didn't build it out of any sense of Yankee solidarity, but rather to let the world know these men passed through as soldiers far from home.
Even today, the New Yorkers stand out like Duke fans in a Tar Heel locker room, mere feet from the bronze statue of a Confederate general.
"I do hear the word Yankee sometimes,' " said Laboda, 58, smiling sheepishly.
In all, more than 500 men died on the Bentonville battlefield, more than half of them rebels trying to stop Gen. William T. Sherman's bloody tear across the South.
That's nowhere near the number that fell at Gettysburg, Antietam or Shiloh. But Bentonville still represents the largest battle fought in North Carolina, and the last in which the South made a big tactical push.
But for Laboda, who grew up on Long Island, the flat fields of Johnston County hold special purpose.
Laboda's Civil War obsession dates back 40 years, taking him as far west as Vicksburg. He sits in a rocking chair on his front porch, alongside a small cannon. His relic collection includes a Union uniform worn by a wounded soldier at Antietam, its sleeve torn off at the soldier.
Still, some parts of southern Johnston County look a great deal as they might have 1865 - wide-open, farms stretching to the horizon.
In the 1980s, he and his brother would visit Bentonville because it was so close to Interstate 95, getting permission from landowners to comb their fields with metal detectors.
He'd come home from those trips with suitcases full of turnips or pecans given by friendly locals. In turn, he asked them to keep their eyes out for land near the battlefield that anyone might want to sell.
Then, in the mid-1990s, he bought 22.5 acres that border the battlefield on two sides.
Laboda had a 1904 beadboard house moved to the property, restored it and retired there from his parks department job in Garden City, N.Y. He built a rustic new life where the cannonballs had flown.
Laboda took a part-time job as a battlefield guide. He donated land for the Johnston statue. He built a brick memorial to all the soldiers who crossed his land, known as the Morris Farm.
All of them honored
Once Laboda learned about the 123rd Regiment, he gathered all he could from the unit's Civil War past - not just the hundreds of bullets resting under his soil, but letters they sent home and souvenirs from their war days. Among them: a sergeant's cap box with a rebel bullet stuck in its leather.
"Everything is a prize," he said. "I found a bullet the other day and part of a button. I'm always wondering if where I'm walking today, there may be a bullet right there."
You can almost feel what happened here: see the artillery that would have stood near a tree line in the distance, hear the sound of shells exploding in this countryside now grown as quiet as a graveyard.
Whatever side you favor in this war that turns 150 this year - if you favor one at all - Laboda asks that you think about the thousands of feet marching down the roads now paved with asphalt, and the sandy footprints buried underneath.
