Tag Archives: Augusta

Confederate cat kills a Maine soldier

The last Confederate that Corp. Nahum H. Hall ever thought could kill him was an angry tabby, perhaps Sgt. Puss N. Boots, First Florida Feline Regiment. Hall, a Rockland resident, was 33 when he enlisted as a private in in Co. G, 28th Maine Infantry Regiment, a nine-month regiment that mustered at Camp E.D. Keyes […]

Battle of Baton Rouge hero drowns courtesy of the U.S. Navy

Confederates shot Reverend Joseph P. French, and his own navy drowned him. Born in Solon in Somerset County, the 35-year-old French was a Methodist clergyman living in Old Town in 1860 with his 34-year-old wife, Lucretia. They had three daughters: Clara (5), Sarah (4), and Josie (2). Hannah French, 64, lived with the family; she […]

Trouble awaited Abner Coburn, Maine’s second war-time governor

Abner Coburn stepped into a political mess upon becoming Maine’s second war-time governor as the calendar transitioned to 1863. Born to farmers Eleazar and Polly Weston Coburn in Canaan in Somerset County in March 1803, Coburn studied at Bloomfield Academy in the town of Bloomfield, which lay across the Kennebec River from the upper section […]

Israel Washburn Jr. steps down as Maine’s first war-time governor

Late on Monday, January 5, 1863, a weary Governor Israel Washburn Jr. walked from his office to the Executive Council Chamber located elsewhere in the Maine State House in Augusta. But Washburn likely gave little thought to such concerns tonight. As he approached the Executive Council Chamber’s rosewood doors, the bespectacled and diminutive Washburn exchanged […]

Politicians’ anti-war resolutions angered returning Port Hudson veterans, part 2

As a Boston & Maine Railroad train carried the 21st Maine Infantry Regiment toward home on Friday, August 7, 1863, Col. Elijah D. Johnson and his surviving officers read the resolutions passed two days earlier during the Democratic State Convention held in Portland. History does not record who read the resolutions aloud on that rattling […]

Coastal cruise brought dignitaries to Fort Popham as Gettysburg raged

A day before draft riots erupted in New York City, some well-connected Maine residents took a cruise on the Kennebec River to see the latest War Department infrastructure being built on the coast. If anyone discussed Gettysburg and its aftermath that pleasant day, a newspaper correspondent invited along for the voyage didn’t mention it. Writing […]

Confederates raid Portland harbor, and Edwin Stanton does not care

Confederate sailors under Lt. Charles W. Read, CSN, had captured the Revenue Service cutter Caleb Cushing in Portland harbor early on June 27, 1863 and had almost gotten away. Unable to fire up the cutter’s steam engine and hampered by a fickle, apparently pro-Union breeze, Read and his crew were overtaken by two pursuing steamers […]

Cavalry trooper killed at Middleburg came home to a hero’s funeral

A telegram arriving in Gardiner on Monday, June 22, 1863 broke a mother’s heart and stunned people living in the Kennebec River port. George Stone Kimball, age 30, was dead, killed by hostile fire in Virginia’s Bull Run Mountains days earlier. “In the springtime of life … blessed with education and talents and all that […]

Gardiner on the Kennebec provided recruits for Co. I

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, […]

Augusta CSI pursues a soldier’s killer

Had a serial killer struck in the Kennebec Valley? Had he dispatched yet “another victim”? Augusta authorities knew they had a serious problem “on Tuesday morning,” November 25, 1863. “The dead body of a man having no clothing on but an under shirt, was found in a pasture” on the Randall farm, “about four miles […]