Tag Archives: Sherman

Old Zack and the upgraded Civil War monument

Civil War memory lingers to this day in Sherman, the Maine town that sent the highest percentage of its men of any Northern municipality to help save the Union from 1861 to 1865. Between the Washburn Memorial Church and the veterans’ monument in Sherman Mills (the town’s built-up section) stands a small cannon mounted on […]

Small Maine town emptied out to help save the Union

To the aptly named Sherman, Maine goes “the undisputed honor of being the Banner Town in the United States” by summer 1865, according to late 19th-century historian May H. Spooner. And how had this small town located amidst the rolling hills in southwestern Aroostook County earned this distinction? By sending “113 soldiers” to help preserve […]

Appomattox Road: You have read of Virginia rainstorms and Virginia mud

Reading the letters that her brother, Daniel Withum Sawtelle, wrote from Virginia in January and February 1865, Caroline Sophronia Murphy developed a good idea about what passed for winter in Virginia. The widowed Murphy often traded letters with Daniel, born in Minot in April 1838 and raised in Township 3, Range 5 in southwestern Aroostook […]

The women of Sherman

  The shots fired by Confederate artillery at Fort Sumter in April 1861 echoed as far away as Golden Ridge Plantation in southwestern Aroostook County … … and still echoed four years later when the residents of Sherman — the town which the plantation became on Jan. 28, 1862 — took stock of the high […]