Tag Archives: Stafford County

Trouble awaited Abner Coburn, Maine’s second war-time governor

Abner Coburn stepped into a political mess upon becoming Maine’s second war-time governor as the calendar transitioned to 1863. Born to farmers Eleazar and Polly Weston Coburn in Canaan in Somerset County in March 1803, Coburn studied at Bloomfield Academy in the town of Bloomfield, which lay across the Kennebec River from the upper section […]

We fight “because one should love his country the best of all”

  He had survived the slaughter at Fredericksburg, the “Mud March,” and a winter so cold and deadly that at least one historian would describe it as the equivalent of Valley Forge for the miserably sullen Army of the Potomac. So why did he stay with the standards? Other Union soldiers had deserted during winter […]

Mud on the Mules

  Cold rain dripping from his campaign hat, Lt. Col. James “Jim” S. Fillebrown sat squarely in the saddle and watched the mucky chaos engulfing his 10th Maine Infantry Regiment on Wednesday, Jan. 21, 1863. Until three days earlier, Fillebrown and his men had spent the early winter camping near Fairfax Court House in Virginia. […]