The article concerned Bob Melia using his infrared camera to track illegal drugs along the Texas border. But at the time, she didn’t think he would use it to learn about Salisbury’s Confederate Prison or the Freedman’s Cemetery. She couldn’t have known it would lead to plans for exploring the past of the Old Stone House and go further into the prison’s sink area because of the secrets it holds about Salisbury in another day.

And it certainly never occurred to her that his work with history in Salisbury, instead of disaster and law enforcement and the environment, would thrust him into the international spotlight and bring attention from the Associated Press and CBS and Fox and Popular Science and telephone calls and more telephone calls.

“We were just sitting at the table,” she remembers, catching up on family news.

Bob Melia is family. Their parents were good friends when they were growing up in the mountains near Asheville. Bob’s father died when he was 16 and his grief-stricken mother packed up her five children and moved to her old home in New Jersey almost immediately. But the relationship with Bogle’s family deepened. Her father, who had six daughters and no sons, became the surrogate dad to a boy who had no dad. For all their lives, Bogle and her sisters have felt he was “the only brother we ever had.”

And she remembered that article when Sue Curtis, president of the Robert F. Hoke Chapter of the United Daughters of the Confederacy, said she wished the chapter knew the real boundaries of the old Salisbury Confederate Prison.

“I told her I’ve got an old friend in New Orleans who does all this infrared stuff,” she says, “and we called him up, and he said he’d be glad to do it.” And waive his $2,500 a day fee if the UDC would pay expenses.

The UDC paid expenses. Keith Lambert used his helicopter to help Bob carry out his high tech search, and the camera and skills he’d learned in the Coast Guard and used in Oklahoma City bombing and Bosnia’s mass graves indicated the boundaries of the prison weren’t exactly where people thought they were.

What’s more, his cameras show the cemetery has four trenches, not the 24 previously thought and confirmed what historian Louis Brown has always argued — that approximately 4,000 Union prisoners, not the 11,700 counted by the U.S. Congress and chiseled into the granite marker — are buried there.

It pointed out prison landmarks like an old cornfield just outside the wall and the sink area, or pit, where the prison trash and sewage had gone.

During another trip he pinpointed graves in the old slave and Freedman’s Cemetery at the corner of North Church and West Liberty streets for the city.

The pictures — known as thermal images — that he took of both projects are now on disks at the Library of Congress, and the Smithsonian Institution has asked for more data and more images.

“That will happen,” Bogle says, “as soon as we can work out the funding.”

Word has spread

Bob Melia’s Real Time Thermal Imaging business, headquartered in New Orleans, has been growing. Crisis and environmental calls come in from around the world.

An example was a trip to North Carolina last week in response to a call from Plantation Pipeline.

He came to map a “contamination plume,” where diesel had gotten through a pipe and ended up migrating into a stream in Davidson County.

“I just confirmed where everything was,” he says in a telephone interview with the Post, “and that it was not a threat to any large bodies of water, people or property and that Plantation Pipeline had done a good job of responding to the incident.”

But word is also out that his camera and experience can uncover important historical information as it did in Rowan County. Less than a month ago, an Associated Press story summarizing that work went out nationally and internationally.

And his phone began to ring.

And ring and ring and ring.

In less than a month he’s had more than 200 calls from people as far apart as Idaho and England — all wanting him to help them find the past.

“I’ve fielded everything from small churchyard grave sites to major battlefields in the Civil War,” he says, “and I’ve responded to about 80 percent of them.”

One especially tugs at him because he fears a historic site in Ohio — the only place in the state where a Civil War battle was fought — is about to be lost.

“I’ve flown the area and identified where 40 of these guys are buried,” he says. Apparently the owners “want to harvest the gravel and that will destroy parts and pieces of people. I stand ready to go again,” he says. “That’s such a waste of history.”

He’s also ready to come back to Rowan County because he thinks there’s still much to be learned here — especially from the sink area at the old prison site, at the Old Stone House built by Michael Braun, and at the area near Dan Nicholas Park where Braun’s brother, Abraham, built his home.

The work will be a joint project of the Rowan Museum and the Rowan Convention and Visitors Bureau. The directors of those organizations, Kaye Hirst and Judy Newman, are working to get funding to cover expenses. Melia will continue to give his time, as will an archaeologist, Jill-Karen Yakubit, who is president of Earth Search in New Orleans.

Bogle has developed a budget that includes Melia’s and Yakubik’s expenses and airfare and the cost of a videographer.

Back in Rowan County

Melia visited the Old Stone House about a year ago with Hirst and found differences in the soil that indicate the presence of a man-sized hole that could have been a tunnel.

“They tracked it,” Bogle says, and verified a legend dating back to Indian days of a tunnel that led about 100 yards from the house.

“He was interested and talked to the archaeologist,” Bogle says, “and she was really excited about it.”

He also found two drinking wells at the corner away from the kitchen area and indications of other structures.

At Abraham Braun’s house, which no longer exists, they found old-cut stone that resembled foundations for colonial buildings and evidence of a hearth.

But the big thing, Melia says, will be the sink area at the prison site. A creek ran through the area before the prison was established, and the sink is a sunken area in the creek where people of that time disposed of sewage and trash of all kinds.

“We really think that the whole history of Salisbury is in that sink area,” Bob says.

“They’ve been filling that in for years, and basically there’s a history book there. It’s going to show the Civil War community, the black area and more. We think that by pulling up samples, we can look at stratification and can pretty much come up with how people lived then.

“Archaeologists depend on the remainder of trash, on bones, animals, stone, tools, pottery, a lot of which can be dated. In a place where you’ve had a major event like that prison and the Civil War, they’ll be finding stuff from Confederates, Union soldiers and normal citizens.

“It’s the target area,” he says. “When they widened Long Street, a lot of dirt went into that sink. We expect to find a lot of things in there.”

Time and time again, he says, “we’ve demonstrated that we can identify ‘miden’ areas.”

“A miden area is a place in the soil where you’re going to find trash features and every day living features.”

An example, he says, are old slave cabins where researchers have found “fans.” Those are place where debris was swept from the door over a period of 20 to 30 years, and the sediment on the ground pointed the way for an archaeologist to discover the past.