Tag Archives: Dedham

Cemetery of Flies — Part II

The stench grew as Col. Harris Plaisted and an 11th Maine Infantry companion known only as “S” approached the front lines west of Seven Pines, Va. on Friday, June 19, 1862.* Here, on Saturday, May 31, Maj. Robert F. Campbell of Cherryfield had brought companies A, C, and F out of the 11th Maine camp […]

Cemetery of Flies — Part I

So big they all but clogged his horse’s nostrils, the swarming flies also targeted Col. Harris Plaisted as his nervous horse clopped across a sloppy Virginia field on Friday, June 19, 1862. Beside him a mounted 11th Maine Infantry Regiment officer — Plaisted commanded the battle- and disease-shredded unit — waved a hand at the […]

Confederates in the Attic (and Maine cemeteries, too)

Tony Horwitz, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author who has historically examined such subjects as John Brown and his bloody raid and European exploration of North America, released his delightful “Confederates In The Attic” in 1998. A “must read” for Civil War buffs, the book explores why the war remains so palpable in many Southern locales. But […]

Buried far from home

  In his “From the Fields,” a tribute to the soldiers North and South who died on far-flung Civil War battlefields, folksinger Kyle Thompson claims that “from the fields I hear them calling, from the fields where they fell.” During our first trip to Colonial Williamsburg, circa 1996-97, we made the obligatory trip to Yorktown […]