Tag Archives: Ezekiel Holmes

Free chowder and summer sun lured thousands to Fort Popham in 1862

Bad wartime news could not stop a shindig held in Phippsburg on Friday, August 29, 1862. Second Manassas raged in northern Virginia as people converged on “the mouth of the Kennebec river, on the spot anciently called the peninsula of Sabino” to observe “the 255th anniversary of the planting, by Sir George Popham and his […]

Come and get your Antietam dead

Maine boys still littered the Antietam battlefield six months after George McClellan and Robert E. Lee battered each other senseless on that mid-September day. Sometime in early spring 1863, New York resident James S. King traveled to Sharpsburg, Maryland and “visited the field of Antietam in search of the remains of a friend,” reported the […]

Civil War research digs into the weed patch

Researching the Civil War deep “into the weeds” requires time, patience, and a passion for the war. War-related research resembles a well-run Maine farm. There are the highly visible “crops”: the apple orchard, the potato field (think Aroostook County), the pea vines and bean stalks, etc., etc. Let’s compare that same farm to research related […]

Open your mouth and say “ah”

In the summer of 1862, prospective recruits joining the five new infantry regiments forming in Maine faced one gauntlet not run by the volunteers of ’61: tougher medical exams. Fourteen months earlier, doctors had approved recruits because they had sufficient fingers and toes and a palpable pulse. Stunned by vast numbers of soldiers medically discharged […]

Reports of My Death are Greatly Exaggerated: Selden Connor

The news struck Kennebec Valley residents like a lightning bolt: Selden Connor, long associated with the vaunted 7th Maine Infantry Regiment, was dead, shot and mortally wounded on May 6, 1864, during the Battle of the Wilderness. “Gen. Seldon (sic) Connor, late of the 19th Maine … died last week in Washington,” reported the Daily […]