Category Archives: Battlefields

Recent photos suggest the Little Round Top restoration is winding down

Photos recently released by the National Park Service suggest that the too-long-by-far closure and restoration of Little Round Top may soon end. The NPS closed LRT and its approach roads in July 2022 for a restoration project scheduled to take 12 to 18 months to complete (as advertised then). The project’s complexity obviously made 12 […]

Bath taxes the rich to recruit 90 soldiers

Known as the City of Ships, Bath on the lower Kennebec River already swarmed with soldiers when Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton issued General Order No. 94 on August 4, 1862. The order called for the loyal states to draft 300,000 militia for nine months’ service in the army. On Tuesday, July 8, Maine […]

The ultimate in Civil War cruises is scheduled for 2024

David Glasgow Farragut would be jealous! If you’re a Civil War buff who’s also “into” cruising, American Cruise Lines has got the ultimate dream excursion for you! Based in Guilford, Connecticut, ACL announced on May 22 “a new cruise that visits nearly every major battlefield of the Civil War.” The 35-day Civil War Battlefields Cruise […]

Nurse Abba Goddard hears mention of the 10th Maine, part 4

Maine at War celebrates Women’s History Month with a four-part tale about nurse Abba Goddard and her adventures at Harpers Ferry during the Antietam Campaign. You can read part 1 here, part 2 here, and part 3 here. Cheers erupted (and probably echoed) across Harpers Ferry as civilians and paroled Union soldiers saw that “our […]

Nurse Abba Goddard meets hard-bitten Confederates at Harpers Ferry, part 3

Maine at War celebrates Women’s History Month with a four-part tale about nurse Abba Goddard and her adventures at Harpers Ferry during the Antietam Campaign. You can read part 1 here, part 2 here, and part 4 here. Named matron of the Clayton General Hospital in Harpers Ferry in summer 1862, Maine nurse Abba Goddard […]

New Brunswick men bolstered the Union ranks during the Civil War

Maine sent approximately 73,000 men into the army to fight during the Civil War, but not all those recruits hailed only from the Pine Tree State. In fact, “over 2,400 New Brunswick-born men enlisted in the State of Maine,” says Canadian historian and Civil War re-enactor Larry Burden. He and his wife live in St. […]

Charged up to fight: 4th Maine Battery “sees the elephant” at Cedar Mountain” — Part III

Yelling at his men, Capt. O’Neil W. Robinson Jr. hurtled his 4th Maine Battery across country as they approached a Union firing line about 8 miles southwest of Culpeper, Va. on Saturday, Aug. 9, 1862. Riding on caissons and limbers or running alongside the horse-drawn artillery, the Maine men sweated profusely as they approached the […]

Mutineers could drive an officer crazy

Deserters were not the only man-made plague that drove Maine officers crazy during the Civil War; independent-minded Maine soldiers might mutiny, too, if they so decided. Patriotic fervor swept the Midcoast in mid-April 1861. A business partner with Hiram Berry, Elijah Walker sold coal and lumber in Rockland, recently split from Thomaston and designated the […]

Spotsylvania Part VII: The dying groaned beneath the dead

As some 20,000 Union troops charged out of the fog and burst into the Mule Shoe salient at Spotsylvania Court House, Va. on May 12, 1864, Confederate resistance collapsed beneath the onslaught. Union soldiers swept up 3,000 prisoners, including the cane-wielding Maj. Gen. Edward Johnson and Brig. Gen. George Steuart, who led a mixed North […]

Spotsylvania Part IV: Maine regiments joined a Union battering ram

Did a Confederate sharpshooter seal the fates of some 200 Maine soldiers — and another 800 other Union boys — during the Battle of Spotsylvania Court House? Possibly. Dawn on Monday, May 9, 1864 found Col. Clark S. Edwards and his 5th Maine Infantry Regiment camped behind the rapidly lengthening Union earthworks northwest of Spotsylvania, […]