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. […]
For Civil War buffs everywhere, we are pleased to announce the May 1st release of Maine at War Volume 1: Bladensburg to Sharpsburg. Experience Maine’s involvement in the first 18 months of the Civil War as told by the men and women who left the Pine Tree State to defend and preserve the Union. Gleaned […]
Isabella Fogg had already encountered the horrors of war when the slaughter known as Antietam took place on Sept. 17, 1862. Then Fogg discovered the hell that is war. Surnamed Morrison, her parents had emigrated to New Brunswick from Scotland before Isabella’s birth in 1823. Practically a child bride when she married William […]
Neither Winsor B. Smith nor Bludgeon the Horse ever forgot that dark Virginia night when the Confederate spooks came calling. Born in Bridgton in 1842, Smith joined the 1st Maine Cavalry Regiment’s Co. K as a private in August 1862. He developed an impressive wartime resume, including a six-month stint as a Confederate prisoner. That […]
Sometimes we can almost reach across history and “touch” a Civil War veteran. At least with Andrew Derby Bean from Brooks, we can touch the trunk that he took to war in spring 1861, and if only that trunk could talk, If only the trunk owned by Andrew Derby Bean could talk, the war […]
After Abraham Lincoln asked the loyal states to send more men to fight the Confederacy in early summer 1862, the War Department requested that Maine raise four additional infantry regiments. That meant Maine would send 4,000 men (at 1,000 men per regiment). With 15 infantry regiments already sent to far-flung battlefields, Maine would create the […]
What was Robert E. Lee thinking? Among the battlefields preserved by Richmond National Battlefield Park, Malvern Hill is my favorite site. Standing amidst the cannons aligned east of the Crew House, I can see the open fields across which Lee hurled his infantry on July 1, 1862. These cannons, sited to approximate the Federal […]
The Civil War created many legends, from the eccentric Virginia Military Institute professor transformed into “Stonewall” Jackson to the borderline alcoholic and military strategist — Ulysses Simpson Grant — who whipped Southern troops wherever he encountered them. And the war generated a historical lore that, to this day, requires historians to sift fact from legend. […]
Freedom of the press – at least the press owned by Bangor Democrat Marcellus Emery – literally flew out the window on Aug. 12, 1861. By that summer, many Maine Democrats opposed the fledgling Civil War. In his 1967 graduate thesis “Civil War Bangor,” Professor John DiMeglio wrote that Democrat State Committee Chairman Marcellus Emery […]
Among the overlooked historical jewels in our beautiful state is the Maine State Museum, located along with the Maine State Archives and Maine State Library across the parking lot from the State House in Augusta. The museum maintains permanent and temporary exhibits. Among the permanent (i.e., “been there forever”) are “Back to Nature” (I recall […]
