It will take four years, but the nation has begun to mark the anniversary of events that made up the American Civil War. Upstate New York will remember the role it played in that war and 150 years later, YNN's Bill Carey says it was a conflict that touched nearly every town and every family.

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SYRACUSE, N.Y. -- They go unnoticed most of the time. Walls and plaques filled with names. Those who left their homes 150 years ago to fight in a war that many had long expected.

"It was finally happening. And there were banners across Salina Street and a lot of patriotic symbols, flags, hanging from home windows and that sort of thing. Everybody was very excited about it," said Thomas Hunter of the Onondaga Historical Association.

The nation was not quite a hundred years old. But a schism, north and south, caused by slavery, threatened its existence. Soon there were battles and heroes. At a place called Gettysburg, Syracuse units fought side by side. A sergeant named William Lily, under fire, repaired his unit's flag and lead them into the fight. It's a scene depicted on a memorial in the heart of Syracuse and remembered at Lily's burial site on the city's northside.

There is no shortage of monuments and memorials to those who died in the nation's bloodiest conflict. More than 600,000 fell. More Americans died than in World War I and World War II combined.

At home, there was a hunger for news from the front lines. What neighbors fought. What neighbors died. Letters from Lt. Colonel Augustus Wade Dwight, published in Syracuse newspapers, provided those details.

As the war drew toward its close, Dwight had risen to command of a local regiment. Just two weeks before the surrender at Appomattox, the letters from Dwight ended. He had fallen in battle.

Most of the soldiers on the front lines left home in 1861 expecting a brief war. But the conflict lasted a full four years. It took even longer for the wounds, both physical and mental, to heal.

"The people had changed. Certainly, the soldiers had changed after seeing years of warfare and the brutality of it. So, you can never go back to the old days," Hunter said.

The nation changed as well. Born the previous century, its people had determined it would remain one nation, setting the stage for becoming a superpower in the next century.

Using its collection of diaries and letters from Civil War veterans, the Onondaga Historical Association has launched a Twitter program, providing messages from the front as they would have been received 150 years ago. Visit twitter.com/OnondagaHisAssn for more information.