A Saco adolescent aged remarkably before joining the 16th Maine Infantry Regiment. Whatever his actual age, he experienced war at its worst during the next four years. According to the 1860 U.S. Census for Saco, George A. Deering was the youngest living-at-home child of James M. Deering and Charlotte Deering. A wealthy merchant, James Deering […]
Home on furlough after Gettysburg, Maj. Gen. Oliver Otis Howard feared that loyal Mainers (and Americans) might throw away at the ballot box the blood and guts spilled on the battlefield since April 1861. Sent to Maine to rest, Howard chafed to rejoin XI Corps. “It will be impossible for me to comply with any […]
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 […]
Maine’s adjutant general might believe otherwise, but the some four-score enthusiastic volunteers reporting for duty in rural Maine in mid-spring 1861 knew exactly who commanded them. Responding to the Fort Sumter news, young (and not so young) Piscataquis County men had enlisted in a local company by late April. The Maine Legislature had carved the […]
Local women paid for two of the three veterans’ monuments in Newport, a town (3,133 residents in 2020) located at the modern crossroads of central Maine, the “Newport Triangle” where Interstate-95 meets routes 2, 7, 11, and 100. Those two monuments (and later the third) honor Newport’s Civil War veterans, in part or in whole. […]
Gathering at a local cemetery beneath a beautiful late summer sky, residents of Milo re-dedicated their town’s Civil War monument this August with capable assistance from Civil War descendants and re-enactors. Participating organizations included the Milo Historical Society; the Sarah Elizabeth Palmer Tent No. 23, Daughters of Union Veterans of the Civil War; the Col. […]
Late on Monday, January 5, 1863, a weary Governor Israel Washburn Jr. walked from his office to the Executive Council Chamber located elsewhere in the Maine State House in Augusta. But Washburn likely gave little thought to such concerns tonight. As he approached the Executive Council Chamber’s rosewood doors, the bespectacled and diminutive Washburn exchanged […]
On a warm and overcast June Saturday morning, we pull into the Monroe Village Cemetery, a rural burying ground in equally rural northern Waldo County. Laid out across sloping terrain rising toward the southwest, the cemetery borders the Monroe Road about a half mile northeast of Monroe Village, the developed area around the intersection of […]
As a Boston & Maine Railroad train carried the 21st Maine Infantry Regiment toward home on Friday, August 7, 1863, Col. Elijah D. Johnson and his surviving officers read the resolutions passed two days earlier during the Democratic State Convention held in Portland. History does not record who read the resolutions aloud on that rattling […]
Angered by resolutions passed during the Democratic State Convention held in Portland in early August 1863, “life long Democrat” Col. Elijah D. Johnson and his battle-hardened 21st Maine Infantry veterans organized an ad hoc meeting, discussed the situation, and “unanimously adopted” their own resolutions counterpointing the Democratic ones. The fact that the Maine lads held […]
