Tag Archives: 11th Maine Infantry

Going Home: “ragged and dust laden” they marched into Richmond

When Robert E. Lee affixed his signature to the Appomattox Court House surrender document on April 9, 1865, he effectively flipped the Civil War switch to “off.” The shooting suddenly stopped, except in specific regions of the Deep South and Trans-Mississippi where Confederate and Union troops would not learn about the surrender for days. Gunfire […]

A Confederate cluck brings a County soldier little luck

A chicken ratted out Lawrence Kelley. The son of Patrick and Rachel Whitenacht Kelley of Eaton Grant (which became the eastern half of the Aroostook County town of Lyndon in 1859), Kelley was familiar with farm animals, especially with which critters made a tasty treat. The knowledge came in handy when marching past Confederate farms.* […]

Heroes sailed from Frenchboro to save the Union

Every nook and cranny in Maine sent men to fight during the Civil War. From a far-flung nook of Hancock County — the Town of Frenchboro — came perhaps a baker’s dozen of men determined to preserve the country. Located on Long Island (often called “Outer Long Island” in the past) on the southern edge […]

Sliced and diced 11th Maine fights in four pieces: Part II

For a precious few minutes around 12 noon on Saturday, May 31, 1862, all four pieces of the 11th Maine Infantry Regiment stood on the battlefield at Seven Pines, Va. Then the Confederate onslaught smashed into the Union picket line astride the Williamsburg Stage Road, and the collision sliced and diced the already quadrisected regiment. […]

The end of Appomattox Road: paying the ultimate sacrifice

  So close, yet so far: Some Maine soldiers who witnessed the literal dawn of peace at Appomattox Court House on Palm Sunday, April 9, 1865 did not see its sunset. Their blood, along with that shed by many other Union soldiers that day, was the price to end the Civil War. As the 11th […]

Appomattox Road: “We waited for morning and Gen. Lee’s army” — April 9, 1865

  Shortly after sunset on Saturday, April 8, 1865, a few dozen 1st Maine Cavalry troopers and their weary horses vanished into the Virginia darkness near Appomattox Station, a major stop on the Southside Railroad linking Petersburg with Lynchburg. The troopers went foraging for food and fodder while their comrades remained near the station. Suddenly […]

Life in the Florida swamps

For the 11th Maine Infantry boys accustomed to relatively tame reptiles and bugs back home in the Pine Tree State, duty in the northeastern Florida swamps proved eye-opening. Boarding the steamer “Boston” at Beaufort, S.C. on Thursday, June 4, 1863, soldiers assigned to the 11th Maine headed south to Florida. “Daylight of the 5th found […]

Help was on the way

  To paraphrase the patriotic song “We Are Coming, Father Abraham,” by February 1863, the war-weary Maine veterans manning the nation’s ramparts from Virginia to Louisiana could “look across the hilltops that meet the southern sky,” where “long moving lines of rising dust your vision may descry.” Those dust clouds were kicked up by the […]