After three years spent searching, I finally “found” Joshua L. Chamberlain, just not where you’d expect him to be. Recently I wrote about using primary sources when doing Civil War research. Among such sources unique to Maine are the Soldiers Files found on microfilm at the Maine State Archives in Augusta. Sometime after the war, […]
Reading the report he addressed to Gov. Israel Washburn Jr. on July 18, 1862, you can just “see” the steam venting from the ears of Maj. Robert F. Campbell. The 6-foot, 45-year-old Cherryfield lumberman was livid. Third in command of the 11th Maine Infantry Regiment, he was filling in for the ill Col. Harris […]
Pain wracking his shattered body, George Ray Parsons shivers as he stirs in the damp Fredericksburg mud in midafternoon on Saturday, Dec. 13, 1862. He’s been hit, whether by a 0.58-caliber lead bullet or a shell fragment, he cannot tell. Seeping blood suggests the wound in his side is bad … real bad. Parsons […]
Tilden is dead. He whom Confederates could not kill along the railroad at Fredericksburg or at Oak Hill outside Gettysburg, he whom as the 16th Maine Infantry’s “Harry Houdini” never met an escape opportunity that he would not take, he is dead. Born in Castine on May 7, 1832, Charles W. Tilden died at his […]
Betty Spearing of Winterport had a connection with Gettysburg when she first visited that battlefield as a child. She just didn’t know it then, nor when she returned to Gettysburg for the second time. Thanks to a great uncle, Henry Hathaway, Spearing learned 15 to 20 years ago that her great-great-grandfather, George Henry Fisher, had […]
Charles Tilden led 275 men of the 16th Maine Infantry Regiment into Gettysburg around noon on Wednesday, July 1, 1863. Only 40 men answered the regimental rolls after sunset on that bloody day. The other 235 men had vanished after savagely battling thousands of Confederates that afternoon. Among the missing was Tilden, who hailed from […]
The 16th Maine boys know that if they charge those distant hills, they will die. So do the Johnnies awaiting them. And today, just 12 days before Christmas 1862, there can’t be a more miserable place to die than on these muddy farm fields about 2 miles downriver from a Virginia town called Fredericksburg. […]
From time to time we will wander to Gettysburg and visit the monuments left there by Maine units. Today let’s walk where the 16th Maine Infantry Regiment fought and died. Late afternoon on July 1, 1863, Col. Charles Tilden and his 16th Maine were west of Gettysburg, holding a line that essentially stretched from […]
