Tag Archives: Orono

The Letter to the Widow

Note: Memorial Day is Monday, May 27 After watching a young Maine soldier slip into eternity, Nathaniel P. Banks shared the captain’s last moments in a poignant letter to his widow. Born in Exeter, the teen-aged Abbott Coan moved to Orono in the early 1850s. Eschewing the initial patriotic call to arms in spring 1861, […]

Black or white or both, he made a good Maine soldier, Part II

On June 16, 1862, a New Orleans businessman named B. Bronson discovered that his “light mulatto” slave, Calvin, had run away. With Union troops occupying the Big Easy, Bronson probably figured he would never see Calvin again. An enigmatic character, the “B Bronson” recorded in the June 28, 1860 census of “free inhabitants” of the […]

Did Daniel Chaplin develop a death wish?

  Did Col. Daniel Chaplin lose his desire to live after watching the annihilation of his beloved 1st Maine Heavy Artillery Regiment at Petersburg on Saturday, June 18, 1864? Yes, surmised Pvt. Joel Brown of Orono and Co. I. And Chaplin’s own behavior suggests the behavior of a man who cared not if he lived […]