Death, heroes and ghouls at a Springfield cartridge factory

Pinfire cartridges manufactured by C.D. Leet & Co. of Springfield, Mass. 
(Aaron Newcomer via Wikimedia Commons)

Like this blog on Facebook | Follow me on Twitter | My YouTube videos
As soon as he heard the explosion, Charles M. Atwood knew his greatest fear had been realized.

“There goes Leet's cartridge factory,” the young man said to himself. Then he sprinted from his boardinghouse toward his former place of employment blocks away, in the heart of Springfield, Massachusetts.

---

'Human gore': More on deadly Civil War explosions on my blog

---

BOOM! BOOM! BOOM!

At 2:30 p.m. on March 16, 1864, a series of massive explosions ripped through the C.D. Leet & Co. cartridge factory on Market Street, reverberating across town — not far from the national armory that supplied the U.S. Army with thousands of Springfield muskets and other weaponry. Leet's employed 23 women and girls and 24 men for the production of metallic cartridges for Joslyn and Spencer carbines and other weapons.

Headline in the Springfield Union
  on March 16, 1864.

Small explosions and accidents often occurred at the three-story factory leased by 40-year-old Charles Dwight Leet. A week or two earlier, Atwood quit his job, as others also had recently, because he dreaded the potential for disaster. Perhaps the accident at Leet’s factory the previous month pushed him over the edge. That day, roughly a half-pound of gunpowder blew up, frightening more than a dozen female employees, burning five of them and filling a room with smoke.

But that accident paled in comparison with this tragedy, which underscored dangers faced by ammunition workers on the home front. The final death toll reached nine — four in the explosions and subsequent fire, five afterward. Nearly a dozen suffered injuries.

The next day, officials convened a coroner's inquest to determine what caused the catastrophe — the second such disaster at a Civil War munition factory in a little more than a year. On March 13, 1863, more than 40 female workers died in an explosion at a Confederate arsenal on Brown’s Island in Richmond. More than 130 workers, mostly female, died in explosions the year before at the Allegheny Arsenal near Pittsburgh, an arsenal in Jackson, Miss., and a fireworks-turned-cartridge factory in Philadelphia.

A label for metallic Spencer carbine cartridges made at the C.D. Leet factory in Springfield, Mass.
(Wood Museum of Springfield History)

The Springfield tragedy revealed the best — and worst — of humanity.

Atwood and 10th Massachusetts Lieutenant Lemuel Oscar Eaton and Private John Nye — soldiers who just happened to be in the neighborhood — dashed into the burning factory to aid victims. Atwood knew where workers stored gunpowder, and to avoid an even greater disaster, he rushed to help remove it. As Eaton tossed powder cases out of harm's way, another explosion rocked the building, briefly knocking the 32-year-old officer senseless. He was due to return to his regiment the next day.

Lieutenant Lemuel Oscar Eaton of the
10th Massachusetts dashed into
the burning factory.
(The 10th Regiment Massachusetts
 VolunteerInfantry, 1861-1864)

After removing four cases, Atwood and Eaton proceeded to move another when it exploded, burning Atwood on the face and hands. Miraculously, both escaped without serious injuries. (Two months later, Eaton suffered a  serious leg wound at the Battle of Spotsylvania Courthouse.) Nye suffered burns but also recovered to return to his regiment.

Upon their arrival shortly after the first blast, Springfield firemen discovered a grim scene: flames leaping from shattered windows, huge columns of smoke, wailing victims, scores of gawkers and friends and family searching for loved ones employed at the factory.

Fourteen screaming girls leaped from the third floor of the factory onto the roof of the shop next door. They "were removed by ladders," the Springfield Republican reported, after firemen and others made "the most frantic threats” to keep them from jumping to the ground.

"The conduct of the firemen and all those who volunteered to enter the burning building was heroic in no light sense of the word," the newspaper wrote. "Among the most active and efficient of all the attendants were eight or ten of our city physicians, who were unceasing in their efforts to relieve the sufferings of the unfortunate men and women."

Rescuers wrapped a burning victim in a blanket and took her to a nearby house after she leaped or was blown out of an upper-story window. In one of the most heartrending sights, a severely burned female victim, crying and groaning in agony, begged for arsenic or any other deadly concoction to end her misery.

   
    GOOGLE STREET VIEW: Approximate location of long-gone C.D. Leet & Co. factory.

---

"The appearance of those who were worst injured was shocking beyond description," the Republican reported. "Every garment of their clothing was blown or burnt off, and some of them were literally a blistered and blackened mass from head to foot. So badly were they burnt that it is surprising that they were not instantly killed."

Calista Evans, a widow from New York, suffered burns over her entire body and died the next day at her sister’s house in Springfield. It was only her second day on the job. Laura Bishop, who only recently had returned to work after an accident at the factory, also died. The 22-year-old's injuries, the newspaper wrote, were of the same “shocking character” as the other horribly burned women.

Gravesite at Saxton's River Cemetery
 in Vermont for Laura Bishop, who was killed
 in the Springfield cartridge
factory disaster. (Find A Grave)

The tragedy crushed one family. John Herbert Simpson, a 27th Massachusetts veteran, stood near the loading room when the first explosion rocked the building. “Shockingly burnt,” the 19-year-old died the next morning. His 15-year-old sister, Anna, also suffered severe injuries.

“The suddenness of the affliction has prostrated Mrs. Simpson,” the Republican wrote about the siblings’ mother, “and the best of medical care can only restore her to health.”

Leet business partners Willard Hall and Horace Richardson also died the day after the explosions. Hall, who supervised 20 men and women, suffered  severe burns on his head and chest; Richardson, who managed the gunpowder and supervised three young women, fell through a set of stairs and into the cellar after the final explosion. He was attempting to save girls on the second floor.

Jane E. Goss also suffered severe burns in the explosion — her first day at work at the factory — and died nearly three weeks later. At the depot, Joshua Bellows — who later enlisted in the 4th Massachusetts Heavy Artillery — identified the remains of his adopted daughter, 17-year-old Frances.

The injured, meanwhile, suffered terribly.

“Nearly all of those who were burned have complained of being cold,” the local newspaper wrote, “and have fainted upon breathing cold air.” The disaster drove a young female factory worker from West Springfield "insane," according to a report.

---

Do you know more about the Springfield tragedy? Email me at jbankstx@comcast.net

---

Underscoring the horror, depraved onlookers picked up ghastly souvenirs: pieces of burnt flesh and fingers of victims. The following day, a crowd gathered to examine the disaster area. Some of the ghouls among them snatched “any piece of a partially burned dress, or other scrap." the Republican reported, “as a memento of the terrible scene.”

Unsurprisingly, intense heat and fire caused the discharge of bullets from completed cartridges. Two went through the hat of contractor Jesse Button, who aided victims inside the factory and escaped with only minor injuries. Another narrowly missed the head of a woman who was sewing at her workplace on Main Street. Yet another zipped into a nearby dental office but caused no injuries.

At the coroner's jury of inquest, a six-person panel vigorously questioned Leet employees about safety procedures, potential causes of the explosions and more.

A close-up of the weather-worn memorial in
Springfield (Mass.) Cemetery for
John Herbert Simpson, a victim of the
disaster at the C.D. Leet & Co. cartridge
factory. (Find A Grave)

The first floor of the factory included the engine room and a spice manufacturer. Leet’s office and the cartridge loading and packing room occupied the second floor. Workers had stacked 25-pound cases of gunpowder at the bottom of the main stairwell leading from the first to second floor.

Cartridge production started on the third floor — employees kept the highly combustible fulminating powder there wet in a paste form to prevent accidental explosions. After the fulminate dried, workers married it to the cartridges, which female employees charged with powder from flasks in the second-floor loading room. The cartridges were eventually prepared there for shipment in cardboard boxes.

Minnie Russell worked in the loading room, where workers inserted bullets into cartridges. She testified that on the morning of the explosions, Leet urged female employees to sweep up excess gunpowder, even “if it took half their time.” Charles Smith called his employers “very careful men, none more so. [I] have heard them talk very hard to the hands.”

But Leet himself testified about a questionable practice at his factory: Although he did not allow cigar smoking, he was OK with friends lighting up as they left, passing cases of gunpowder in the process. Paradoxically, Leet — who had been involved in cartridge manufacturing since 1857-— emphasized the strict safety measures in place to prevent explosions.

Ultimately, the investigation determined the chain-reaction catastrophe began in the second-floor loading room. A cartridge apparently exploded, its sheet of flame touching off another blast fueled by fulminate and gunpowder. Then a massive blast momentarily lifted the third floor. In the chaos, some panic-stricken employees descended the stairs, their burning clothes igniting cases of gunpowder. Lucy S. Howland, who worked in the loading room, testified she was sent tumbling into the cellar — “all afire and burned awfully" — when the stairs collapsed. She somehow crawled from the burning building.

Officials reprimanded Leet, who was not in the factory when distaster struck, for woeful safety procedures.

“Hazardous,” “highly censurable,” “highly reprehensible,” the coroner’s investigation called his operation. In a subsequent investigation by the U.S. government, an inspector called Leet’s copper cartridges and the compounds used inside them “exceedingly dangerous for magazines and transportation.”

But Leet, who wasn’t charged with a crime, re-opened his factory weeks later.

The war — and cartridge making — dragged on.

---

-- Have something to add, correct? E-mail me at jbankstx@comcast.net

SOURCES

• Fall River (Mass.) Daily Evening News, April 13, 1864
• Hartford Daily Courant, March 28, 1864
• Springfield Republican, Feb. 20, March 17, 19, 22, 1864
• "The Market Street Explosion," The Gun Report magazine, Alan Hassell, 1989. (U.S. government investigator quoted by Hassell from National Archives records group 156, no. 21.)
• 1860 U.S. census

'Peculiarly sad': Death in the Potomac of a 'patriotic man'

St. Clements Island, formerly known as Blackistone Island, near where Cunningham Johnston drowned in the Potomac River on the night of April 23, 1865. (PHOTO: David Broad)

Like this blog on Facebook | My YouTube videos

Private Cunningham Johnston emerged physically unscathed from all the 118th Pennsylvania’s major battles — Shepherdstown and Fredericksburg in 1862, Gettysburg and Chancellorsville in 1863. He slogged through Burnside’s “Mud March” in January 1864 and, after Confederates captured him during the Overland Campaign, survived nine months in Andersonville and other Southern prisons. 

But in the waning days of the Civil War, when most of the fighting had ended, the Irish-born Philadelphia bricklayer could not elude death. On April 23, 1865, Johnston and about 300 former POWs and hospital convalescents boarded the steamer Massachusetts, anchored in the Potomac River at Alexandria, Va.

 1906 illustration of St. John's College
General Hospital during
 the Civil War.  (St. John's College Digital Archives)

Fresh from St. John’s College Hospital in Annapolis, Md., the 37-year-old prepared to rejoin his regiment and complete his term of service. The war had effectively ended, but turmoil gripped the country: In Maryland and Virginia, Federal authorities hunted for Lincoln assassin John Wilkes Booth.

 Around midnight, the Massachusetts approached Maryland’s Blackistone Island, roughly 55 miles southeast of Washington. Nearby, the Black Diamond — an iron-hulled canal boat with men aiding the search for Booth — drifted in the darkness. The clear, moonless night left the vessel with only a single light. 

Without warning, the much larger Massachusetts slammed into the Black Diamond, tearing a gaping hole in the smaller ship’s side. The vessel sank stern first in about three minutes. “Oh, the great dark hole in the water she made,” a soldier aboard the Massachusetts recalled. Panic swept the overcrowded Massachusetts.

Though she remained afloat, she rode lower in the water. In the inky blackness, frantic soldiers — some jolted awake on deck — leaped into the Potomac. At least 50 men drowned; some reports placed the toll closer to 90. Cunningham Johnston numbered among them. The river never returned his body.

“After all their suffering in the prison pens, then to be drowned,” one survivor said. “It seemed bad.”

Decades later, In a footnote in the 118th Pennsylvania regimental history, Cunningham Johnston Jr. called his father’s fate “peculiarly sad.” “He was a patriotic man,” he wrote, “and patiently accepted the dangers and hardships of army life as a duty to his country.” 

          GOOGLE STREET VIEW: Site of orphans' home in Quakertown, Pa., where two 
                  Johnston family boys stayed after their father's death in April 1865.

---

19th-century view of Yellow Springs (later known as Chester Springs), an orphans' home in Chester, Pa. Cunningham Johnston Jr. and his brother, Michael, lived here after their
   father's death. (Chester County Library collection)

Cunningham's death threw the Johnston family into turmoil. His wife, Elizabeth, placed  her eldest sons, Cunningham, then 12, and 10-year-old Michael in the Soldiers Orphans' Home in Quakertown, Pa., "for the purpose of their education." Later, the boys were sent to another orphans' home, Yellow Springs, in Chester, Pa.

"I have not abandoned the support of any of said children, nor permitted any of them to be adopted by any person or persons ..." Elizabeth stated in an affidavit for a widow's pension. The Johnstons' other children, 14-year-old Sallie, 5-year-old Elizabeth and 4-year-old James, remained at home with their mother.

A widow's pension file offers us a glimpse into the family's tragedy: In an affidavit, Elizabeth wrote, "I have never heard from [Cunningham] him since" the collision on the Potomac. In another, a former 118th Pennsylvania officer wrote he believed he heard of Johnston's death from an official source but wasn't sure. A document noted names and birthdates of the Johnstons' children; another, the date Cunningham and Elizabeth were married in 1847.

"I feel as well as I ever did," wrote
Cunningham Johnston in a letter
to his wife on April 13, 1865.
 (fold3.com via National Archives)

The most poignant words in the file are in Cunningham Johnston's own handwriting.

In a letter to Elizabeth from St. John's College Hospital on April 10, 1865, he wrote of his disappointment at not receiving any recent letters from home and of the "glorious news" of Robert E. Lee's surrender the day before. "I feel purfickly sure," he said, "that I have seen my last battle although I am in poor halth as I ever was."

"Tell Cunningham," he added, referencing his son, "to ask Mr. Boles if he thinks the ware will be over before linkin is out of the Chair."

In perhaps the final letter of his life, Cunningham rejoiced: "I have just finnished reading the most walcom letter I have ever received from you or anyone else letting me know that my Lizay was better and the rest of my family well."

He said he expected to go to Washington soon to get transportation to return to his regiment, present at the surrender of the Army of Northern Virginia at Appomattox Courthouse. "I feel as well as I ever did," he wrote.

And, Cunningham closed in the letter, "I ... am your loving husband to death."

POSTSCRIPT: Elizabeth Cunningham secured a widow's pension at the standard rate of $8 a month. Beginning in July 1866, her five children also received pensions, at $2 a month. 

---

-- Have something to add (or correct) in this post? E-mail me here.

SOURCES

• Cunningham Johnston widow's pension file, fold3.com via National Archives and Records Service, Washington, D.C.
• Smith, John L., History of the Corn Exchange Regiment, 118th Pennsylvania Volunteers, from their first engagement at Antietam to Appomattox, Philadelphia, Pa., J. L. Smith, 1888, Page 402
• 16th Connecticut veteran William Nott 1906 journal, copy in author's collection.

Is this 'New Market Angel,' a Union soldier rocked by tragedy?

A post-war image of John Adams, who served as a corporal in the 34th Massachusetts.
 (Photo courtesy Susan Harnwell, 15th Massachusetts web site)

Like this blog on Facebook | Follow me on Twitter
By late spring 1864, the brutal reality of the Civil War had tragically struck home in West Brookfield, Mass., for Benjamin and Frances Adams, parents of three sons in the Union army.

On Sept. 17, 1862, Private William Levi Adams was severely wounded in the left lung at Antietam during horrendous fighting in the West Woods. Only 22, he died weeks later of his wounds at Smoketown Hospital near the battlefield. **  Earlier in the war, William had been captured at the Battle of Ball's Bluff, a disastrous Union defeat along the Potomac River, near Leesburg, Va., and was briefly confined in Richmond before he was paroled.

Top: Private William L. Adams of the
15th Massachusetts and brother George,
a private in the 34th Massachusetts.
Both died during the Civil  War.
(Photos courtesy Mark Lawyer)

On May 15, 1864, a rainy Sunday, John W. Adams and his brother, George, went into action with comrades in the 34th Massachusetts near New Market, Va. -- a battle made famous by the participation of more than 250 young Confederate cadets from the Virginia Military Institute in Lexington. When the fighting began for the regiment about 1 p.m., the 34th Massachusetts was in a ravine near the Jacob Bushong farmhouse, Adams recalled. Much to the chagrin of 34th Massachusetts soldiers, he remembered, many in the 18th Connecticut skedaddled as the fighting opened.

“There was for a number of years after the War a very biter [sic] feeling in our regt the 34 Mass against the 18 Conn. for their running away from us at New Market,” Adams wrote decades after the battle.

A 20-year-old private in Company I, George E. Adams was "struck by a musket or rifle ball in the head and died instantly," according to his captain, Alexis Soley. Sometime early in the fighting, John was knocked unconscious by a shell fragment, then crawled toward the Valley Pike, where he was shot in the right thigh when he stood near a tree stump.

"The bullet was what they called there a plug bullet about an inch long and smooth with a hollow in the rear end," Adams recalled years later. "I have it still after going through my thigh or thigh bone. I lied on the ground across a root of that stump until dark the night of the 16th when I was picked up by two men, and carried into the Bushong Barn where I staid [sic] 2 days, I think, until a Comrade and myself was taken in a dead Ox Wagon up to the town hall at Harrisonburgh and then to a building just outside of the town and the next day was put into a brick house belonging to Col. Asa Gray."

Captured, Adams was sent to Andersonville. Remarkably, the 25-year-old corporal in Company I survived five months in captivity before he was paroled and finally discharged on April 19, 1865. But before the eldest son of Benjamin and Frances Adams was taken to the notorious POW camp in southwestern Georgia, he may have "forgot his own pain" to perform a remarkable act of kindness for a Southern family. After the rag-tag Confederate army defeated the Federals at New Market, Adams was among the wounded left behind in the town of about 800 people.

In 1889, a Lynchburg, Va., woman named Orra Langhorne wrote in the Boston Transcript newspaper about a Union soldier whose selfless act after the Battle of New Market apparently led to the discovery by a Southern family of the grave of their loved one. Langhorne, an early leader in the suffragette movement, was a correspondent for the Richmond Times as well as the Transcript and other publications. Despite living in heart of the Confederacy in New Market, her physician father was an ardent Union man. Langhorne was in her early 20s in 1864. Published under the headline "Made His Foe's Tombstone," her account of events in New Market during the Civil War appeared in several U.S. newspapers in  the winter of 1889:

“A number of Massachusetts soldiers, wounded in the battle of New Market, were left in my native village in the Shenandoah valley. A few days before, the Confederate authorities, moving their stores to prevent capture by the approaching Federals, had requested the citizens to take into private houses a few Confederate soldiers too ill for removal from the town. Lieut. [Alfred] Woodly, a West Virginian, was carried to my father’s house, and, though every effort was made to save him, he died in a few days. At my father’s request Dr. [Charles] Allen, the surgeon of the Thirty-fourth Massachusetts regiment, left in charge of the wounded Federals, visited Mr. Woodly at our house and paid him every possible attention.

Surgeon Charles Allen treated seriously
wounded Confederate officer
Alfred Day Woodley at New Market.

"In my daily visits to the Federal hospital, which was near us, many kindly inquiries were always made for the wounded ‘stranger within our gates.’ One morning I told the Federal soldiers that our guest was dead, and many regrets and much sympathy for his family were expressed.

"A soldier, named Adams I believe, who sat on the floor nursing his wounded foot, said to me gently: 'I am a marble cutter by trade, and if you will give me a slab of hard wood I will carve Lieut. Woodly’s name on it so that his family can find his grave after the war is over.’ One of the walnut boards used to mark the soldiers’ graves was sent to the hospital and the wounded Federal forgot his own pain in carving in clear typo the dead Confederate’s name and regiment, with the words, ‘He giveth His beloved sleep.'  

"In the spring of '65, after Gen. Grant had received Gen. Lee’s surrender and ordered that the ‘boys should keep the horses they would need to make a crop,’ a young widow, with her two lovely boys, the eldest about 6 years old, visited the soldiers' cemetery in our village and, parting the tangled grass, found the name of her husband carved by the foe who had been actuated by love, not hate, though he, too, had suffered. There was no pension for the widow or her babes; a cruel struggle with poverty lay before them, but as she knelt and kissed the sod above her lover-husband, she blessed the man whose care had enabled her to find the grave.

"In conclusion Mrs. Langhorne says: 'Cannot the noble women of Boston, who did so much to aid our beloved country in her hour of need, find some pity in their hearts for those who have suffered so severely for the cause which they were taught to believe was right? Massachusetts men forgave their enemies when the fighting ceased.' "

Documentation indicates it was possible Adams was indeed the soldier described by Langhorne in the account published nearly 24 years after the Civil War ended. Of the soldiers with the surname Adams in the 34th Massachusetts -- the only regiment from the state to fight at New Market -- only John W. Adams was wounded. The soldier Langhorne described was wounded in the leg, where Adams suffered his wound. But there's also reason to believe he may not be Langhorne's soldier.

John Adams' grave in Pine Grove Cemetery
in West Brookfield, Mass.
(Find A Grave)

A bootmaker before the war, John Adams was described as a "mechanic" when he enlisted in the Union army on July 9, 1862, opening the possibility his craft could have included "marble cutter." The only soldier in the 34th Massachusetts whose occupation was listed as a marble worker was Private John A. Pratt, who also was wounded at New Market. The location of his wound, however, is not known. Did the initial "A" for Pratt's middle name stand for "Adams," perhaps explaining Langhorne's reference to a soldier named Adams? Further research or aid from a reader could confirm whether Adams, Pratt or another soldier from Massachusetts was the "New Market Angel."

What's not in dispute is the tragedy suffered by the Adams family during the Civil War. Nearly five years after George's death, his mother filed for a government pension, an effort to supplement the family income limited by her husband's inability to work consistently since the summer of 1859. According to physicians' affidavits in the George Adams pension file, Benjamin Adams suffered an accidental blow to the head in August 1859, which produced "faintness and giddiness" and led to complaints of liver and stomach ailments. Eventually, a pension of $8 a month was approved for Mrs. Adams, whose family income had been supplemented during the war by George.

Married three times, John Adams was active in veterans' organizations after the war, including an association of New Englanders who survived Confederate prisons. He helped raise $60 for a Civil War monument on the town green in West Brookfield. He died at 74 of heart disease on Feb.13, 1913, and was buried in the town's Pine Grove Cemetery near his brother, George. William Adams' remains rest in Antietam National Cemetery in Sharpsburg, Md., a short distance from where he died in the fall of 1862.

The remains of Alfred Day Woodley, the officer in the 62nd Virginia whose name was carved into a headboard by a Massachusetts soldier in the spring of 1864, lie in a cemetery in Harrisonburg, Va.

---

Do you have more information on this story? E-mail me here.

A zinc memorial for brothers George and William Adams in Pine Grove Cemetery
in West Brookfield, Mass.

NOTES AND SOURCES

** Sources give two dates -- Oct. 10 and Nov. 7, 1862 -- for William Adams' death at Smoketown Hospital near the Antietam battlefield.

-- 1860 U.S. Federal census
-- Alanson Hamilton Grand Army of the Republic Personal Sketches, Adams' brothers biographies, accessed online Nov. 27, 2016.
--American Civil War Research Database, accessed online Nov. 27, 2016.
-- Brookfield (Mass.) Times, Feb. 14, 1913.
-- George Adams' pension file via fold3.com, National Archives and Records Administration, Washington, D.C.
-- John Adams’ letters to B.A. Colonna, Dec. 3, 1910 and Feb. 23, 1911, Virginia Military Institute Archives
-- Nelson, John H, As Grain Falls Before The Reaper, The Federal Hospital Sites And Identified Federal Casualties at Antietam, Privately published CD, Hagerstown, Md., 2004. (Nelson's excellent work is source for William Adams' wound at Antietam. He cites Maryland Hospital Record 352, Record Group 94 Entry 544, National Archives, Washington D.C., as source for that information.)

The art of war: A double-rack 'organ' of Springfield muskets

  Like this blog on Facebook.
We usually equate the implements of war with death and destruction. As this double-rack organ of 645 1861 Springfield muskets at the Springfield (Mass.) Armory National Historic Site shows, that need not always be the case. After muskets were assembled, this is the way they were stored back in the day. My dad, "Big Johnny" Banks, would have loved this. (Click on all images to enlarge.)

Soldier snapshot: POW at Spotsylvania, died at Andersonville

A close-up of a marker for Ferdinand Crossman in South Sutton Cemetery in Sutton, Mass.

Memorial marker for Crossman, who's actually buried in Andersonville National Cemetery.

Like this blog on Facebook.

For more on Ferdinand Crossman
and the Andrew's Sharpshooters,
check out "Our Aim Was Man," published
in November 2016 and edited by
Roberta Senechal de la Roche.

During a recent visit to a cemetery in Sutton, Mass., this marker, near several toppled and crumbling tombstones, caught my eye. "Erected to his memory by his wife. Addie," read the words near the bottom of the gray slab of slate. Only 30 years old, Ferdinand Crossman, a private in the Massachusetts Sharpshooters (Andrew's Sharpshooters), died of "disease of the bowels" at the notorious prisoner-of-war camp at Andersonville and actually lies buried there in Plot No. 5150.

Perhaps unable to travel to Georgia to visit Ferdinand's grave, Addie and her children, Sarah and George, found solace by honoring his memory in the cemetery in Sutton. Here's the story of Crossman -- Addie's nickname for him was "Fer"  -- from the History of Sutton, Massachusetts, published in 1878:

"Ferdinand J. F. Crossman, son of Martin L. and Experience, was brought up by his grandmother Crossman, on this place. He enlisted at Cambridge, Aug. 19, 1862, in Andrew's first company of sharp-shooters, and went into camp at Cambridge. He left camp for Washington Dec. 1st, where he remained but a short time.  

"He was in the first battle of Fredericksburg, Dec. 11, 1862. He was stationed at Falmouth during the winter, and was again in the battle of Fredericksburg June 11, 1863. During this battle a ball passed through his hat, and one of his fingers was shattered by a bullet. Lysander Martin, a young man of great promise, enlisted with him, and was at this time by his side. They occupied an advanced position behind some fallen trees, or stumps, and were firing through small apertures, and took turns in watching the firing of the enemy.  

"Ferdinand retreated just over a knoll to have his finger attended to, but soon returned to find his companion prostrated on the ground, having been wounded by a ball which entered his cheek, knocking out several teeth, and came out at the back of the neck. A general retreat was now ordered, and the wounded who were able marched off the field, and others were huddled into wagons and carried off, Martin among these, who died of his wound the nineteenth. At Gettysburg, Crossman was in the battle from July first to the fourth, and from this field was sent to Harper's Ferry.  

"He spent the winter in the hospital at Washington, D. C. , taking care of the sick and wounded. In the spring, May 3, 1864, he rejoined the army, and was in the battle of the Wilderness from the fifth to the seventh. At the battle of Spotsylvania Court House he was taken prisoner, carried to Columbia, from thence to Andersonville, where he died Aug. 8, 1864."

In 1866, Addie Crossman married a Civil War veteran named Frederick Burr, with whom she had another child. She died in Kansas in 1892

Wanted: Photos of Corp. Charles Adams, Nurse Marie Greene

Charles Adams, mortally wounded at the Battle of Cold Harbor, lies buried in 
East Cemetery in Litchfield, Conn.

On June 11, 1864, 10 days after he had been severely wounded at the Battle of Cold Harbor, 19-year-old Charles Adams arrived in Washington aboard the hospital steamship Monitor. It was a a “quiet, sunny morning” so calm on the Potomac River that there was barely a ripple on the water.

After all the other wounded men had been taken from the ship, only Adams remained. A surgeon advised against moving the corporal in the 2nd Connecticut Heavy Artillery because he believed Adams only had a short time to live. A woman named Marie Barton Greene, a nurse with the U.S. Sanitary Commission, arrived to provide comfort for the teenager from Litchfield, Conn.

A short time after Greene boarded the Monitor, she asked Adams if he had a keepsake for his family, but he didn’t, or couldn’t, communicate. “He seemed waiting, watching for the time to come, and said distinctly ‘I am ready to go.’,” the nurse recalled, before he “fell asleep in death as calmly and noiselessly as falls an autumn leaf to the soft green sod beneath.”

In a letter to Adams sister months later, Greene recalled witnessing the suffering of other soldiers. “I have stood by the side of many a dying soldier and I cannot tell you how it has pained my heart to see them dying without a hope in Jesus,” she wrote. A distant relative of famed Civil War nurse Clara Barton, Greene signed the note, "The Soldiers Friend."

       The 2nd Connecticut Heavy Artillery suffered heavy casualties here at Cold Harbor. 
     (CLICK ON IMAGE FOR FULL-SCREEN INTERACTIVE PANORAMA. MORE HERE.)

On June 19, 1864, a service for Adams was held at the Congregational Church in Litchfield, near the town green and a short distance from the road on which he and his comrades marched off to war in mid-September 1862. Afterward, Adams’ coffin was taken a quarter-mile to East Cemetery, accompanied by three officers from the 2nd Connecticut Heavy Artillery and soldiers from the 1st Connecticut, and following a prayer,  the 19-year-old’s remains were buried.

Months later, Greene still had the young man in her thoughts. She requested a photo of Adams from his sister.

“Perhaps I am asking too much of you but I have given much time and attention to soldiers at the wharf as they came from the front and the hospitals,” she wrote to Mary Adams. “Consequently, I have become deeply interested in some and I am now collecting photographs of some with circumstances connected with my meeting them. If you have an extra one of your brother Charlie I would be very grateful for it.”

When she finally received an image, she thanked Mary, calling it “perfect.”

One of the unsung heroes of the Civil War, Greene died in 1907 at 79 and is buried in Prospect Hill Cemetery in Uxbridge, Mass.

For a special project, I hope to find photos of Adams or Greene. If you can help, e-mail me at jbankstx@comcast.net

SOURCE:

Adams Family Collection, Litchfield (Conn.) Historical Society

Civil War nurse Marie Barton Greene is buried in Prospect Hill Cemetery in Uxbridge, Mass.

Slipped into oblivion: A Connecticut tragedy on the Potomac

A stone carver created a small drum near the top of a memorial for Private George W. Carter
 in West Suffield (Conn.) Cemetery. He was a drummer in the 16th Connecticut.

 Like this blog on Facebook | My YouTube videos
NINE DAYS AFTER John Wilkes Booth emptied a single-shot Derringer into Abraham Lincoln’s brain, nearly 400 former Union prisoners of war from Pennsylvania, Connecticut, New York and Maine crammed aboard the Massachusetts, an old steamer moored in the Potomac River at Alexandria, Virginia. "Unfit to carry more than half the number she had on board," a soldier who made the trip recalled. Although the Civil War was effectively over, Uncle Sam had deemed the veterans' services necessary for another assignment in the South.

Later that clear, moonless night, the voyage down the Potomac, to Norfolk, turned deadly, but the tragedy received little notice in the press. The United States government's frenzied search for Lincoln's killer was under way, pushing into the shadows of history the accident that occurred on the night of April 23 and morning of April 24, 1865.

Coverage of the death of Lincoln assassin
John Wilkes Booth in the Hartford Courant
on April 28, 1865.

Eleven soldiers from the 16th Connecticut, perhaps the Union Army's most unfortunate regiment, sailed aboard the Massachusetts. All had recently returned from furloughs at home. Each of the men, none older than 27, had survived the bloodiest day in American history, Sept. 17, 1862, when the rookie regiment suffered 204 casualties at Antietam. Nineteen months later, on April 20, 1864,  nearly their entire regiment had been captured at Plymouth, N.C., and sent to Andersonville, the war's deadliest POW camp. Nearly 13,000 Union soldiers, including 290 from Connecticut, died at the squalid, 26.5-acre stockade in southwestern Georgia.

Among the Connecticut soldiers aboard the Massachusetts was 24-year-old sergeant Samuel Grosvenor, who, along with his younger brother Joseph, had enlisted in July 1862. The brothers hailed from England, where their father supported his working-class family as a whitesmith and iron polisher in an iron works in Dudley. 

In 1845, the Grosvenors emigrated to America, settling in Guilford, Connecticut, near Long Island Sound. By April 1865, Samuel had been rocked by tragedy. At Antietam, he was wounded and Joseph, a private, suffered a mortal wound in the 40-Acre Cornfield. After Samuel's capture at Plymouth, he spent seven months in Andersonville, where he recorded a steady drumbeat of death in a pocket diary. 

Like Grosvenor, the other young Connecticut men aboard the Massachusetts had also faced death and despair. Private George Champlin’s brother, Andrew, also a private in the 16th Connecticut, had died of disease in December 1862 after long march to Virginia after Antietam. Corporal William S. Loomis was so ill at one point during his imprisonment that he wasn't expected to survive. His cousin John, a 16th Connecticut quartermaster, saved his life by giving him his place in a line of prisoners to be paroled in December 1864 in Savannah, Georgia.

Upon his release from Andersonville, passenger William Lott, a sergeant in the 16th Connecticut, weighed 85 pounds, 80 pounds less than his enlistment weight. A son of a shoemaker, Nott came from a family that had a rich tradition of military service: William's father served during the War of 1812, and his grandfather commanded the sloop Guilford during the Revolutionary War. Private George W. Carter, a drummer, frequently sent some of his pay to his widowed mother.

---

Corporal George Hollands of the
 101st Pennsylvania watched 
in horror as 20-year-old George Carter
 of the 16th Connecticut 
drowned in the Potomac River.

THE WHIPPING WIND made the water choppy by the time Massachusetts had made her way past bluffs upon which Rebel gun emplacements once protected the Virginia side of the river. By late evening, the steamer neared the wide mouth of the Potomac, where it emptied into the Chesapeake Bay, about 55 miles from Washington. 

If it weren't a moonless night, the men aboard may have spied Maryland's Blackstone Island in the distance. In May 1864, Rebels intended to destroy the lighthouse on the 40-acre island, fearing its use by the Yankees. But the lighthouse keeper begged a Confederate officer to save it, arguing it was his home and his pregnant wife neared childbirth. The officer obliged, confiscating the oil in the lighthouse and destroying its lens and lantern instead.

Dozing below deck on the Massachusetts with his comrades, 24-year-old George Hollands recalled being suddenly awakened late that night by an “awful crash.” It was about 12:30 a.m. The Massachusetts steamed about a mile from Blackstone Island.

“We all sprang to our feet, pulled on our coats and ran up on deck to see what the trouble was,” recalled Hollands, a corporal in the 101st Pennsylvania. * 

The 1,155-ton Massachusetts had knifed into the port side of the Black Diamond, damaging the boiler on the large propeller barge, slashing a hole down to the water line near the wheelhouse and stunning the 20 men aboard. Meanwhile, the Black Diamond had carried off a chunk of the bow of the Massachusetts, "making a hole large enough to take in five or six men abreast down to within a foot of the water's edge," Nott remembered. 

Neither vessel apparently saw the other before the accident. According to one account, the Black Diamond, which had no lights on, was acting as a picket boat, guarding a crossing on the Potomac should Booth and any of his co-conspirators choose to slip across. In the darkness, men panicked aboard the Massachusetts. When the ship took on water, some grabbed planks or anything that floated and leaped into the Potomac. Others clambered aboard the crippled Black Diamond, which rapidly filled with water. The captain of Black Diamond, Nott recalled, attempted to swing his vessel around to the side of the Massachusetts, whose own captain frantically shouted for the men aboard her to move to the stern to keep the bow up.

“In the meantime we were shouting to the boat we had run into — the Black Diamond — to come to our assistance," Hollands recalled. "She circled around and came up alongside of us, and about 150 jumped from the Massachusetts to the deck of the Black Diamond. I was among the first to board her, and I ran immediately to the man at the wheel and asked him if the boat was all right. He said: ‘No; she is sinking.’ I then made up my mind that we had ‘jumped out of the frying-pan into the fire.’ ”

Three days after seven Connectcut
soldiers drowned in the  Potomac,
the tragedy received scant coverage
 in the Hartford Courant.

In the confusion, Nott thought the Black Diamond was a relief boat. As more men jumped aboard her, the vessel settled deeper into the water. The Black Diamond went under in three minutes.

Figuring his best chance to survive was on the Black Diamond, Hollands climbed up her mast. It may have been a life-saving move. When the vessel hit bottom, her deck was covered by about two feet of water. Hollands remained in the ship’s rigging, where he was joined by three or four members of the crew. The crippled but still floating Massachusetts and two other boats that happened by picked up survivors, many of whom had spent hours in the water.

Four 16th Connecticut soldiers — Nott, Private Willard Sessions of Burlington, Corporal Henry B. Cook of Bristol and Private Claudius Margerum of Suffield — survived. Margerum, who was hospitalized nearly five months after suffering a head wound at Antietam, floated in the Potomac for nearly three hours before rescuers saved him. More may have survived, but when the Black Diamond slashed past the Massachusetts, she smashed one of the steamer's two lifeboats.

At least 50 men drowned. Four were Booth pursuers on the Black Diamond: Peter Carroll, Samuel N. Gosnell, George W. Huntington and Christopher Farley, all civilian members of the Quartermaster Corps. Seven 16th Connecticut soldiers, each a survivor of Antietam and Andersonville, drowned: 
Samuel Grosvenor of Guilford; William Loomis, 23, of Enfield; Charles Robinson, 24, of East Windsor; Edward Smith, 21, of Bristol; Henry S. Loomis (no relation to William), 21, of Vernon; George Champlin, 22, of Stafford; and Carter, 20, of West Suffield.

After the collision, Carter leaped upon the Black Diamond, a 16th Connecticut comrade recalled. When she began to sink, he jumped back into the water, using a plank to float until about 2 a.m. In a vivid account, Hollands recalled what happened before Carter vanished into the Potomac:

Carter's body was not recovered 
after he drowned  in the Potomac River
 on April 24, 1865. This 
cenotaph in West Suffield (Conn.) Cemetery
 honors the 20-year-old soldier.

"(Carter) grasped hold of the keel of the boat, or something else, and was hanging on for dear life and calling for help. One of the crew up in the rigging got hold of a rope and time and time again threw it to where the boy was, telling him to grab for it. The boy couldn't get hold of it. Every now and then a wave would wash over him and strangle him, and as he would emerge from it he would call for the rope. He finally became exhausted and cried out to us that he could hold out no longer. ... He said he was a drummer of Co. D, 16th Conn., and asked us to inform his mother that he was drowned. He bade us goodby, and as the next wave washed over him he loosened his hold and sank beneath the waves."

---

EVEN IN CONNECTICUT, the tragedy received scant attention in the press as the hunt for Booth continued. (On April 26, 1865, a Federal search party cornered Booth on a Virginia farm. He was mortally wounded by a Union soldier.) Two days after accident, the Hartford Courant published a 185-word account of the tragedy. 

 16th Connecticut Private George N. Champlin's name appears on the side of his 
brother  Andrew's gravestone in Old Springs Cemetery in Stafford Springs, Conn. 

“We watched the New York papers a few days following the accident for an account of it, but I never saw any mention of it,” Hollands recalled in 1914. “In those days, however, the loss of a ship and a few men was not considered worth mentioning.”

A penny atop Carter's memorial.

Sunk with its smokestack peering above the Potomac, the Black Diamond was considered too old and too damaged to recover. The Massachusetts, salvaged after the accident, was decommissioned in New York in September 1865. She was sold by the government in October 1867 and resumed commercial service early in 1868 under the name Crescent City. On Oct. 17, 1881, the steamer was involved in another tragedy. In dry dock at Pier 48 in the East River in New York, the Crescent City capsized, killing one of the ship’s employees. The unfortunate soul's body was never recovered. Eleven years later, the old Civil War vessel sailed for the final time.

In Connecticut, the young men who drowned in the Potomac in 1864 were honored on memorials scattered throughout their home state. In West Suffield Cemetery, the words are barely legible on Carter’s weathered marker, his last name misspelled "Carterr" on the reverse. A carving of a small drum, homage to his role in the 16th Connecticut, adorns the front of the monument. 

To honor Champlin, a stone carver put his name, regiment and the words "Drowned in the Potomac"  into the side of his brother Andrew's gravestone in Old Springs Cemetery in Stafford Springs. A brownstone memorial and a state-issued marker memorialize Loomis in Enfield Street Cemetery in Enfield. The names of Grosvenor, Robinson and Henry Loomis appear on war memorials in their hometowns. Under the barely legible words "Lost at Sea," Edward Smith's name was carved into the north face of a memorial on a knoll in West Cemetery in Bristol.

Private Robinson’s body was recovered and buried in Arlington National Cemetery, Grave No. 8823. The bodies of the six other Connecticut soldiers who drowned were never found.

The Massachusetts collided with the Black Diamond about a mile
from Blackistone Island, now called St. Clements Island.

---

-- Have something to add (or correct) in this post? E-mail me here.

NOTES AND SOURCES

* A farmer from Mansfield, Pa., Hollands was no stranger to danger. He was shot in the thigh at the Battle of Fair Oaks, near Richmond, in 1862 and survived three prison camps after his capture at Plymouth in April 1864.

• Ancestry.com
• George W. Carter pension file, National Archives and Records Service, Washington, D.C.
• “Military and Biographical Data of the 16th Connecticut Volunteers,” George Q. Whitney Papers, RG 69:23, Boxes 7-8, Connecticut State Library.
• Samuel E. Grosvenor diary, MS 81588, Connecticut Historical Society
• Hartford Courant, April 26, 1865
• Naval Historical Center
• New York Evening Express, Oct. 18, 1881
• The National Tribune, Jan. 29, 1914. May 14, 1914
• St. Clement's Island (Md.) Museum

An Antietam, Andersonville survivor's tragic death in 1865

"I really hope this is the last death I shall have to record in this place," Samuel Grosvenor
wrote in his diary on Sept. 9, 1864. He was imprisoned at Andersonville at the time.
(CLICK ON IMAGE TO ENLARGE.)

Samuel Grosvenor's small diary in the
Connecticut Historical Society collection.

Although nearly 150 years have passed since Sergeant Samuel Grosvenor’s death, I felt like I was invading his privacy as I read short entries scrawled in pencil in his small, leather-covered diary at the Connecticut Historical Society on Saturday.

An unmarried farmer, Grosvenor served in the 16th Connecticut, a regiment whose luck ran out the day it was mustered in in Hartford in late August 1862. At the Battle of Antietam, less than a month after it left Connecticut, the 16th Connecticut suffered more than 200 casualties. Many of the men and boys skedaddled, scared out of their minds; two soldiers fled all the way to England. Grosvenor was wounded at Antietam and soon returned to the regiment. But on April 20, 1864, he and nearly the entire 16th Connecticut were captured at Plymouth, N.C., and sent to Southern prison camps.

In entries in his diary during his seven-month imprisonment at Andersonville, the most notorious Rebel POW camp, Grosvenor regularly recorded the weather – on Aug. 2, 1864 it was “clear and cool” -- as well as a steady drumbeat of death. Conditions at Andersonville were appalling. Many prisoners lived in small, makeshift shelters and bathed in, drank from and met their sanitary needs in a polluted stream that ran through the prison grounds. Nearly 13,000 soldiers died.

A brief account of the sinking of the
Massachusetts appeared in the 
Hartford Courant on April 27, 1865.
(CLICK ON IMAGE TO ENLARGE.)

“Silas Matthews of Company K departed this life,” Grosvenor wrote in a diary entry on Sept. 9, 1864 about a comrade from Bristol, Conn. “I really hope this is the last death I shall record in this place.” Paroled by the Rebels nine days before Christmas in 1864, Grosvenor slowly made his way back North. But the soldier from Guilford, Conn., apparently never saw his home state again.

In the dead of night on April 24, 1865, Grosvenor and other former Yankee prisoners of war were aboard the steamship Massachusetts on the Potomac River when it struck near its boiler by the steamship Black Diamond, a small barge propeller. The Massachusetts sank in about three minutes.

“In the excitement, many soldiers became panic stricken, seized planks and whatever could be found that could float, and hastily jumped overboard,” the Hartford Courant reported in a 184-word account buried in the newspaper on April 27, 1865. “Many were thus drowned.” Andersonville survivor Samuel Grosvenor, wounded at the bloodiest day in American history at Antietam, was among them.

The tragedy on the Potomac was pushed to the margins of history. An even bigger story unfolded that night. The Federal government was looking for Public Enemy No. 1.

His name was John Wilkes Booth.

"The finder will be liberally rewarded by returning to the owner," Samuel Grosvenor wrote on
an inside page of his diary. (CLICK ON IMAGE TO ENLARGE.)

Antietam: 'Murderous fire' claims a young captain

Riddled with bullets, Captain Samuel Brown of the 16th Connecticut was killed
at the Battle of Antietam. The 26-year-old soldier was a teacher before the
Civil War. (Photo from George Whitney Collection/Connecticut State Library)

When Samuel Brown led his men of the 16th Connecticut into action in John Otto's cornfield during the Battle of  Antietam, the 26-year-old captain briefly came face to face with another soldier in his company.

Richard Jobes, a 36-year-old corporal in Company D from Suffield, never forgot that day --  or that moment.

"I was the tallest corporal in the Co. and that brought me at the head of the Co. with Capt. Brown," Jobes wrote in a letter to Brown's sister nearly four decades after the Civil War. "A cannon ball passed between him and myself, but very close to him, so close he thought it passed through his long and beautiful whiskers. It was a 6 or 12 lb. ball. He was pale for a moment, rubbed his face and whiskers, then went on coolly giving his commands." (1)

Born in Massachusetts, Samuel Brown graduated 
from Bowdoin College in Maine, the same college
 that produced Gettysburg hero Joshua Lawrence
 Chamberlain.  Brown appears  here in a Bowdoin College 
photograph, circa 1858.
(Photo courtesy Bowdoin College Archives, Brunswick, Maine)

Although Antietam was the first battle of the Civil War for the 16th Connecticut, Brown had already earned the respect and admiration of his men, who were mustered into the regiment in late August 1862. In fact, he didn't hesitate to admonish them, even using a profanity or two.

Like Jobes, Private William Relyea of the 16th Connecticut also never forgot Sept. 17, 1862. In a post-war account, the veteran wrote about forming in Otto's field, the moments just before the rebels opened a "murderous fire" on his regiment and the awful, deadly results of that musketry.

"We moved into the lot by the opening in the right-hand corner," Relyea, from Suffield, wrote in the recollection that included the map below. "We were then formed in lines directly in front of the opening and extending to the right a little beyond the pile of rails. Captain Brown was anxious that his company would give as good an account of themselves as any in this regiment -- he was cool but somewhat angry at us for not forming a line as we had been taught to do on dress parade and scolded at us some a few minutes after we had formed a little more to his satisfaction." (2)

According to one account, the captain urged his men on by saying, "Charge bayonets and come on, boys!," before the rebels rose up and fired through the corn from behind a nearby low, stone wall. But orderly sergeant Peter Grohman and Relyea  instead remembered Brown yelling at the men in language Relyea described as "emphatic." (3)

"I believe I swear too much for a man in battle," the soldiers recalled him saying. (4)

Minutes later, rebel fire shattered Company D, tearing apart Jobes' left arm (later amputated), severely wounding Corporal John Tate of Enfield (also lost his left arm) and killing Private George W. Allen of Suffield. But it was the death of  Brown -- who along with Newton Manross, John Drake and Frederick Barber was the fourth 16th Connecticut captain killed or mortally wounded at Antietam -- that was most keenly felt by the company. After being struck in the neck, hip and arm, he managed to crawl near the opening where the regiment entered Otto's cornfield. About six feet from that opening, Brown died.

Nearly 46 years after Antietam, Private William Relyea drew this map of where
 Samuel Brown's  body was found in relation to the 16th Connecticut monument. 
See my video below.  (George Q. Whitney Collection/Connecticut State Library)  
CLICK ON IMAGE TO ENLARGE.

Two days later, after Robert E. Lee's army abandoned the field and crossed the Potomac River into Virginia, Brown's body was discovered by Relyea and Grohman. "He lay on his back properly strait (sic), feet toward the gap," Relyea noted. (5)  (Watch my video above.)

Stripped by the rebels of all his outer clothing and shoes, Brown was temporarily buried on the field on the north side of a tree on Otto's property along with other men from Company D, including Allen and Private Henry Barnett of Suffield.  Privates Henry Aldrich of Bristol, John Bingham of East Haddam and Theodore DeMarrs of Cromwell and Sergeant Wadsworth Washburn of Berlin of the 16th Connecticut were also buried in the large trench. In late September or early October, Brown's body was disinterred by Hartford undertaker William W. Roberts, and his brother Louis accompanied the remains back to their hometown of South Danvers, Mass.

Like the deaths of so many other young men with great promise during the Civil War, the passing of Brown was especially tragic. "He was a man of great bravery," Jobes wrote to Brown's sister, "and no doubt if he would have been spared the war would have been much higher than a captain of a company."

 Brown's grave in Monumental Cemetery in Peabody, Mass.
(Photo: Jack Parker)

Born in Danvers, Mass. (now Peabody) on Feb. 16, 1836, Samuel was the son of Fanny and Samuel Brown, a stone mason, who helped build the Battle of Lexington monument on Washington Street in South Danvers. Young Samuel had seven other siblings, including a sister named Fanny, who greatly admired her older brother. A diligent student, Brown graduated in 1858 from Maine's Bowdoin College -- the same school that produced Gettysburg hero Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain, the lieutenant colonel of the 20th Maine.

Following graduation from college, Brown became a teacher in 1860 at the Edward Hall School for Boys in Ellington, Conn., about 20  miles from Hartford. After a short stay at the Ellington School, Brown taught school in Beverly, Mass., before returning to teach at Ellington in the spring of 1862. Although war talk stirred many in Connecticut at that time, Brown at first was hestitant to join the cause there.

"He found the town in a high fever of patriotism and inbibing deeply of the patriotic spirit, changed his mind and became ambitious to enter the service of the U.S.," according to a Brown obituary. Brown recruited 40 men in nearby Enfield and was commissioned a captain in the 16th Connecticut on Aug. 1, 1862. Originally intending to join the cause in his native state, Brown gave up his spot to another 26-year-old man  from South Danvers.

"You know I intended to enter the army and did get a chance as Lieut in the 19th Massachusetts Regiment in the course of the Fall (of 1861)," Brown wrote in letter to his family dated March 18, 1862, "but gave it to a friend of mine, a teacher in one of our public schools, who, having lost his young wife after a year of married life, felt so desirous of a change of scene and seemed so utterly miserable that I resigned in his favor."

Brown's friend, 2nd Lieutenant Charles S. Warner, was killed at the Battle of Fair Oaks on June 25, 1862. His funeral service was held at Old South Church in South Danvers. Nearly three and a half months later, Brown's funeral was held in the same church. During that well-attended service, Reverend William Barbour lamented the loss of a "professional man," a reference to Brown's profession before the war.

"The import of strife deepens around such an offering as this," said Barbour, pointing to Brown's casket. "And this leads me to hasten on by observing that we pay the highest price for principle when our educated men become the sacrifice for our country." (7)

After the service, Brown's casket was borne a short distance to Monumental Cemetery, where the young soldier was buried in a family plot, not far from the grave of his friend, Charles Warner.

(1) George Q. Whitney Collection, Connecticut State Library, Richard Jobes letter to Fanny Brown, Feb. 10, 1909
(2) George Q. Whitney Collection, Connecticut State Library, William Relyea letter to Whitney, Feb. 25, 1909.
(3) Ibid
(4) Ibid
(5) Ibid
(6) Hartford Courant, Sept. 30, 1862, Page 2
(7) Salem (Mass.) Evening News, Oct. 1, 1926

In 1912, this elementary school in Peabody, Mass., (formerly South Danvers) was named for
Brown, who grew up in the town near Boston. Right: Painting of Brown that hangs in the school's
 lobby. (Photos courtesy Captain Samuel Brown Elementary School principal Elaine Metropolis)