Tales from the road: A visit to boyhood home of KIA soldier

Ken Hintz at the boyhood home of 16th Connecticut Captain Newton Manross.

                    Like this blog on Facebook | Follow me on Twitter | My YouTube videos

The beautiful wood floors in the house where 16th Connecticut Captain Newton Manross grew up in Bristol, Conn., are original but have settled in places over time.

“Put a marble on the floor of one side of a room and it might roll to the other,” the owner of the house, Ken Hintz, told me with a chuckle during an impromptu guided tour years ago.

Captain Newton Manross of the 
16th Connecticut suffered a 
mortal wound in the 40-Acre Cornfield
at Antietam.

Hintz and his wife bought the historic property on Washington Street in 1974, adding over the years modern amenities such as a clay tennis court and a swimming pool as they raised their family. But the Greek Revival house, part of which dates to 1746, still has many of its original features, including a bee-hive oven, stone fireplaces and even a tin roof painted bright red.

Manross was one of nine children of well-known Bristol clockmaker Elisha Manross and his wife, Maria. (Two of Manross' brothers, John and Eli, also served in the Union Army.) Newton was a brilliant man, graduating from Yale with a degree in geology in 1850, and a world traveler. A 37-year-old professor at Amherst College in Massachusetts, Manross enlisted in the United States Army on July 22, 1862, excitedly telling his wife Charlotte, "You can better afford to have a country without a husband than a husband without a country." (Love that!)

A little more than a month later, Manross was commissioned captain of Company K of the 16th Connecticut, composed mostly of men from prosperous Hartford County towns. “The father of the company,” one soldier called him. Another recalled how Manross earned the respect of his men by carrying the muskets of three soldiers (and a drum) while on the march from Washington to Maryland.

That's me with window frames from the 
boyhood home of Newton Manross.

In the 40-Acre Cornfield at the Battle of Antietam on Sept. 17, 1862 — the first battle of the war for his regiment — Manross was killed by cannon fire. His death had a profound effect on his comrades.

“The loss of our Captain was keenly felt by every member of the Company, for he not only recruited the men, mostly from the town of Bristol, Conn., but he cared for his men constantly,” wrote Pvt. George Robbins of the 16th Connecticut. “They felt for him almost a filial affection.”

Manross was buried in Forestville Cemetery in Bristol, about a mile and a half from his boyhood home.

“Come out back,” Hintz said during our visit. “I have something you might be interested in.” He took me to a barn-like structure and pointed to the floor at two ancient window frames — original to the house, he said.

“Would you like to have these?”

“Of course,” I told Hintz, who died in June 2024.

One of the treasures I gave away. The other remains in the garage, near the hunks of “witness trees” from the battles of Champion Hill and Nashville. Mrs. B insists they remain there, but despite their out-of-the-way location, neither the window frame nor the other “stuff” are ever far from my mind. 

Neither is one of my heroes, Newton Manross. Nor Ken Hintz, too.