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, […]
Shattered by the Confederate ambush known as the “Middletown Disaster,” surviving Maine and Vermont cavalrymen fled into the descending Shenandoah Valley darkness on Saturday, May 24, 1862. As his soldiers gathered prisoners on the body-plugged Valley Pike, Gen. Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson had greater prey in mind; rather than chase the fleeing cavalrymen, he headed […]
A war of words erupted in a Bangor newspaper in spring 1863 after an Army chaplain allegedly insulted the 26th Maine Infantry Regiment. For the use of one word in a letter written to the Daily Whig & Courier, the Rev. John K. Lincoln earned righteous indignation from a Castine resident. A Bangor Theological Seminary […]
A Confederate ambush in the Shenandoah Valley shot a Black Hawk down in May 1862. Putnams helped settle Houlton, and to John Varnum and Elizabeth Putnam a son was born on April 28, 1838. Six years earlier a Sauk chief had led several Indians tribes in a brief and tragic war against the United […]
