Tag Archives: Rockland

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 […]

Maine impersonates Ohio

A Saco adolescent aged remarkably before joining the 16th Maine Infantry Regiment. Whatever his actual age, he experienced war at its worst during the next four years. According to the 1860 U.S. Census for Saco, George A. Deering was the youngest living-at-home child of James M. Deering and Charlotte Deering. A wealthy merchant, James Deering […]

Typhoid fever sweeps away the 7th Maine Infantry’s top dog

“Mr. Editor: We have lost our colonel,” a 7th Maine Infantry Regiment private informed the Bangor-published Daily Whig & Courier’s William H. Wheeler on Saturday, October 26, 1861. The news shocked many people in the Pine Tree State — and opened the promotion door to an Army captain. Hailing from Belfast, Thomas H. Marshall had joined […]

Bugged by bureaucracy as the 4th Maine’s war winds down

He’d been shot and briefly captured at Gettysburg, had led his men into the maelstroms at First and Second Manassas, and had scurried as dawn approached on December 16, 1862 to find and save missing pickets at Fredericksburg. Now Elijah Walker was home, but bureaucracy followed him even there. With the Army of the Potomac […]

New knees and all, Maine re-enactor marches on Gettysburg’s 2022 Remembrance Day

Carrying a full pack, one Maine-based Civil War re-enactor participating in this year’s Remembrance Day parade at Gettysburg ventured forth on “my new knees” replaced last year. Not knowing how well they would handle the long march to the Gettysburg National Cemetery, he went forth proudly representing Maine heroes who had fought at Gettysburg 159 […]

20th Maine: A warrior goes to glory, a bastard to prison, part 3

As the 20th Maine fought at Little Round Top, Pvt. George Washington Buck stood in the Co. H firing line. Buck had been a sergeant until the regiment’s bastard quartermaster, 1st Lt. Alden Litchfield, had physically assaulted the sick Buck in camp and then reported him for insubordination. The 20th Maine’s colonel, Adelbert Ames, had […]

Maine sailor helps capture a blockade runner

The blockade runner that a Maine sailor helped capture off Cuba became an American warship. A Rockland merchant captain, E.C. Healy, joined the Navy as an acting master and wound up aboard the USS Somerset, a side-wheel ferry launched at a Brooklyn, New York yard in early 1862. Measuring 151 feet in length and 32 […]

The 4th Maine’s Johnnies Come Marching Home, part 2

When the steamer carrying the homeward-bound 4th Maine rounded Owls Head at 3 a.m., Saturday, June 25, Rockland church bells started pealing, the Halfway Point battery “opened a salute,” and a minute gun fired continuously at the steamboat wharf, Vose observed. Aboard the inbound steamer, “every man was anxious to once more set foot on […]

The 4th Maine’s Johnnies Come Marching Home, part 1

Not even a sumptuous meal could keep the 4th Maine Infantry’s hard-bitten veterans from deserting in late June 1864. Losing 184 men during “the battle of the Wilderness,” the 4th Maine continued taking casualties as the Army of the Potomac battered itself bloody throughout May and into June. Twenty-three soldiers went dead or wounded “near […]

Maine naval officer fights on the Mississippi

When the Lincoln Administration announced its intent to blockade Confederate ports, the U.S. Navy sorely lacked the ships and men to stopper every coastal wharf from Tidewater Virginia all the way around to Brownsville, Texas. Gearing up to meet the demand, the Navy bought ships galore. Recruiting qualified officers was not as easy, as Rockland […]