Tag Archives: Baltimore & Ohio Railroad

Don’t be a “Captain’s Pet”

A combat veteran from the 10th Maine Infantry Regiment passed along wise advice to a Maine recruit around the time of Antietam. An unidentified officer, the hard-bitten veteran apparently shared his wisdom sometime between the battles of Cedar Mountain and Antietam. Whether or not he survived the 10th Maine’s blood-letting in the East Woods is […]

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 […]

Harper’s Ferry scenes for locked-down Civil War buffs

If not for John Brown, not many Americans would ever hear about Harper’s Ferry in West Virginia. Nestled in the hole where the Shenandoah River meets the Potomac River, Harper’s Ferry was an important transportation hub prior to the Civil War. The Chesapeake & Ohio Canal curved beneath Maryland Heights across the Potomac, and the […]

That was my last picket line

Notified in mid-July 1865 that they would soon muster out, some 20th Maine lads looked forward to drinking their way home. Col. Ellis Spear quickly put the kibosh to that idea. He realized that when the War Department had called for infantry regiments in summer 1862, surgeons did not examine recruits “in the matter of […]

Horsemen in the Shenandoah: Part I — God sends Company B to finish Creation

  The first “secesh” women that a 1st Maine Cavalry trooper encountered in April 1862 deep in the Potomac Highlands were so “homely” that he was jubilant to “be a native of my prided State.” And no one back home in Maine should get the trooper going about the rugged terrain into which the War […]

Locked and Loaded in Baltimore

Friendly receptions drew loud “huzzahs” as the 3rd Maine Infantry Regiment headed south to the war zone in early June 1861. And then there was Baltimore. Beneath “a cloudless sky,” the 3rd Maine boys left Augusta by train on Wednesday, June 5, 1861, recalled Col. Oliver Otis Howard, the professional soldier from Leeds who had […]