Tag Archives: Hiram Berry

The army bungles discharging two 4th Maine heroes

The War Department kicked out two 4th Maine Infantry officers in November 1863 and promptly kicked one back in. The other guy wasn’t quite so lucky … A Rockland merchant who recruited Co. B, 4th Maine Infantry Regiment, Elijah Walker rose from captain to colonel by spring 1862, when the departing Hiram Berry left the […]

Scarborough’s Hiram Berry fought in Louisiana and Virginia

There’s room in Maine Civil War lore for more than one Hiram Berry. The most famous, the general killed at Chancellorsville, has a quasi-monument at a Rockland cemetery. According to the soldiers’ files maintained by the Maine State Archives, three other Hiram Berrys served in the army during the Civil War. The Hiram Berry who […]

Bangor Historical Society lecture will feature General Hiram Berry

  General Hiram Berry will stride from the pages of history this month to participate in Maine in the Civil War, a fall/winter lecture series presented by the Bangor Historical Society. “Into the Breach: The Life and War of General Hiram Berry” will be the theme as Peter and Cyndi Dalton, Civil War authors and […]

“Boom!” goes the colonel’s career

  Did Elijah Walker blow a future promotion on a quiet night outside Yorktown, Va. in April 1862? Only if he shot off his mouth after a Confederate shot off a cannon that night. A 42-year-old Rockland coal-and-lumber merchant in spring 1861, Walker decided the join the 4th Infantry Regiment being raised by his business […]

Merry Maine mutineers meet their match

  The 4th Maine Infantry boys who merrily mutinied near Washington, D.C. in September 1861 soon met their match. Drawn primarily from the Midcoast, the 4th Maine Infantry Regiment officially mustered into Federal service on June 15, 1861. On Saturday, Sept. 16, the boys of Co. H got to thinking that, since they had enlisted […]

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 […]

If only Andrew Bean’s trunk could talk

  Sometimes we can almost reach across history and “touch” a Civil War veteran. At least with Andrew Derby Bean from Brooks, we can touch the trunk that he took to war in spring 1861, and if only that trunk could talk, If only the trunk owned by Andrew Derby Bean could talk, the war […]