Jarvis E. Blinn, a captain in the 14th Connecticut, was killed at Antietam on Sept. 17, 1862. This is a copy of an albumen. (Courtesy Rocky Hill Historical Society) |
"I am a dead man!" the 26-year-old captain in the 14th Connecticut Infantry said moments after he was shot during fighting on the Samuel Mumma or William Roulette farms at Antietam on the morning of Sept. 17, 1862. (1)
Jarvis Blinn is buried in Center Cemetery in Rocky Hill, Conn., about nine miles from Hartford. Blinn was born in Rocky Hill on July 28, 1836. He later moved to New Britain. |
Barely a month after he enlisted in the Union army, Blinn -- a man who had an "expression of quiet but earnest resolve tinged with a dash of sadness in his air" (2) -- was one of 38 men killed or mortally wounded in the 14th Connecticut on the bloodiest day in American history. A mechanic from New Britain before the war, Blinn left behind a wife, Alice, and two young children.
Well-liked by his peers, Blinn was unanimously selected captain of Company F on Aug. 15, 1862, one week after he enlisted. After his death, his fellow officers in the 14th Connecticut described him and captain Samuel F. Willard of Madison -- also killed at Antietam --as "two brave and devoted citizen soldiers." In fact, on Sept. 27, 1862, the Hartford Courant printed a resolution submitted by 37 officers in the 14th Connecticut that eloquently praised Blinn and Willard.
"Resolved," the statement written on Sept. 20 from a camp near Sharpsburg, Md., began. "That we, their fellow officers and comrades in battle, are doing but bare justice to the memory of these brave and devoted officers, in testifying, in this public manner, to their efficiency in every public and private duty; to their earnestness and zeal in the patriotic cause for which they drew their swords; to their watchful kindness and care over the soldiers of their respective companies; and to their fraternal courtesy ever manifested in their intercourse with ourselves."
Jarvis Blinn's cracked, well-worn gravestone includes his date and place of death. |
Today, he lies there under a cracked, well-worn tombstone, the date and place of his death still easily seen on the marker.
Memorial of Deceased Officers in the Fourteenth Regiment Connecticut Volunteers, Henry P. Goddard, 1872, Page 7
(2) History of the Fourteenth Regiment, Connecticut Volunteer Infantry, Charles Davis Page, Page 51, 1906
(3) Hartford Courant, Oct. 11, 1862, Page 2
(4) Memorial of Deceased Officers in the Fourteenth Regiment Connecticut Volunteers, Henry P. Goddard, 1872, Page 7
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