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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
A day before draft riots erupted in New York City, some well-connected Maine residents took a cruise on the Kennebec River to see the latest War Department infrastructure being built on the coast. If anyone discussed Gettysburg and its aftermath that pleasant day, a newspaper correspondent invited along for the voyage didn’t mention it. Writing […]
Confederate sailors under Lt. Charles W. Read, CSN, had captured the Revenue Service cutter Caleb Cushing in Portland harbor early on June 27, 1863 and had almost gotten away. Unable to fire up the cutter’s steam engine and hampered by a fickle, apparently pro-Union breeze, Read and his crew were overtaken by two pursuing steamers […]
A telegram arriving in Gardiner on Monday, June 22, 1863 broke a mother’s heart and stunned people living in the Kennebec River port. George Stone Kimball, age 30, was dead, killed by hostile fire in Virginia’s Bull Run Mountains days earlier. “In the springtime of life … blessed with education and talents and all that […]
Veterans who had endured Port Hudson’s hell patiently listened as two politicians — one a minister just as long-winded as any elected Maine official — welcomed the weary warriors home. Then they finally got to eat. And a local newspaper reporter criticized their perceived (and collective) lack of appetite. Commanded by Col. George Marston Atwood, […]
Had a serial killer struck in the Kennebec Valley? Had he dispatched yet “another victim”? Augusta authorities knew they had a serious problem “on Tuesday morning,” November 25, 1863. “The dead body of a man having no clothing on but an under shirt, was found in a pasture” on the Randall farm, “about four miles […]
After capturing Maine in late October 1867, Maj. Gen. Phil Sheridan took a whirlwind tour of Augusta, the capital of his latest conquest. He had come north from Boston to tour Maine, New Hampshire, and Vermont, and Mainers had welcomed him as the national hero he was. Now, seated in a stylish barouche with Maine […]
Advancing north from the Piscataqua River, Phil Sheridan realized by the time he captured Maine “that this is the hardest campaign he ever had.” And that difficulty occurred even as Mainers welcomed him as a conquering hero. Viewed by many Northerners as a successful general in the anemically led Army of the Potomac, Sheridan toured […]
