behind AotW

In an 1863 letter home to his parents Private Gavette Burt Holcomb of the 16th Connecticut Infantry wrote

He was a farmer in his hometown of Simsbury, CT for the rest of his life, and was for many years on the school board there. And he apparently owned one of the faster horses in the area, a mare named Belle of Kentucky.

The fairgrounds at Cherry Park in Avon, CT hosted a regional fair every September from 1883 to 1911, complete with horse racing on a dirt oval about 1/2 mile long. There was auto racing there in the 1930’s and 40s and a suburban housing development took over in about 1960.

Gavett is about 17 years old in that photograph, from Jim Silliman out of his collection. His 1863 letter is in the collection of the Simsbury Historical Society. The news clippings are from the New Haven Morning Courier and Journal of 6 September 1895, online from the Library of Congress.

Benjamin Franklin Guest was at least 55 years old when he was killed in the battle at Sharpsburg in September 1862; a Private in Company F, 53rd Georgia Infantry.

His is indeed a hard-luck story.

Family history, supported by the US Census, says he lost his Madison County, GA farm and his family due to his drinking, and by 1860 was living alone, an overseer on a farm in Griffin, Spalding County, GA. In May 1862 he signed-up as a substitute for one R.A. McDonald (possibly Robert Alexander McDonald, 1831-1904) of Company F.

The family story says he was killed by a “sniper” on 16 September at Sharpsburg, which is somewhat unlikely, as the 53rd Georgia and the rest of the Brigade arrived at Sharpsburg from Harpers Ferry at sunrise on the 17th. His very brief military record says he was killed on 17 September.

I don’t have a birth year for every soldier killed at Sharpsburg, but among those I do have, Guest is the 2nd oldest. The oldest being Private Adam Burkel of the 11th Pennsylvania Infantry – who was about 57 years old at Antietam.

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The photograph of Semmes’ Brigade’s battlefield tablet was taken by Craig Swain for the Historical Marker Database (HMDB).

Another excellent photograph from Jim Silliman’s album.

He’s Roland LeVaughn, a mechanic from Rocky Hill, CT. He enlisted in Company C of the 16th Connecticut as a Private, was promoted to Corporal in Maryland in September 1862, and was appointed First Sergeant of Company A in December 1863, which must have been about when this picture was taken.

Roland and his brother William (First Sergeant, Company C) were both prisoners of war at Andersonville, GA. William died there on 7 September 1864 and Roland died in a prison in Charleston, SC about two weeks later.

Here’s another soldier of the 16th Connecticut from the collection of Jim Silliman: Ezra Thomas Burgess of Company E. He was promoted to First Sergeant on the field at Antietam – his new stripes seen here – and survived imprisonment at Andersonville.

A poke in January from James Silliman set me on the path to greatly improve my collection of information about the soldiers of the ill-fated 16th Connecticut Infantry on the Maryland Campaign of 1862. Among several fine photographs he sent me from his collection is this one of Robert Hale Kellogg.

He was an 18 year old Private at Antietam and was promoted to Sergeant of Company A, then Sergeant Major of the regiment in 1863.

After his experience as a prisoner of war in 1864 he wrote Life and Death in Rebel Prisons: Giving a Complete History of the Inhuman and Barbarous Treatment of Our Brave Soldiers by Rebel Authorities, Inflicting Terrible Suffering and Frightful Mortality, Principally at Andersonville, Ga., and Florence, S.C. (1867) – GoogleBooks offers a copy online.

This is John J Creech, late 3rd Lieutenant of Company H, 17th South Carolina Infantry, a veteran of the Maryland Campaign of 1862. He was one of 6 brothers with War service, and all of them survived it.

Starling Jeter Creech (1827-1912) – Corporal, Co. B, 2nd SC Reserve Infantry; Private, Battery G, 2nd South Carolina Light Artillery
John Jackson “Jack” Creech (1832-1883) – 3rd Lieutenant, Co. H, 17th South Carolina Infantry
George William “Billy” Creech (1836-1909) – Private, Co. H, 17th South Carolina Infantry
Richard C Creech (1837-1913) – Private, Co. H, 17th South Carolina Infantry; Private, Battery G, 2nd South Carolina Light Artillery
James Stafford “Jimmy” Creech (1838-1926) – Private, Co. H, 17th South Carolina Infantry
Lewis Barnwell Creech (1843-1919) – Private, Co. H, 17th South Carolina Infantry

Thanks to descendant Larry Hutto for the pointer to the Creech family and for John’s photograph.

26 year old Corporal John Yates was killed at Antietam on 17 September 1862. This (slightly damaged) photograph was probably taken in the Spring of 1861 soon after he enlisted in the 2nd Wisconsin Infantry in Racine.

I found this copy in a goldmine of a book called Racine County Militant: An Illustrated Narrative of War Times, and a Soldiers’ Roster (1915). It’s online from the Internet Archives (and others) and includes some 200 mostly war-era portrait photographs of Racine soldiers, most far nicer than this one of Corporal Yates. I’ll be going back to it again in the future.

Thanks to John Banks for starting me down the path to this photograph and to Shannon Cheney and Gina Radandt at the Kenosha Civil War Museum for sharing a version of this photo from their collection that led to Racine Militant.

Private Jasper Stanford Harris of the 16th Connecticut Infantry survived combat at Antietam in 1862 and imprisonment at Andersonville in 1864 and went on to have a long, ordinary, and one hopes peaceful life. He lived 87 years and was still working his small home farm and painting the neighbor’s houses at 77 in 1920.

Here he is in a photograph probably taken shortly after he enlisted in the 16th Connecticut Infantry in late July 1862. It was contributed to his Find-a-grave memorial by Micki Dischinger.

Private Jason Ebenezer Twiss, Company I, 16th Connecticut Infantry was 30 years old when he was killed at Antietam on 17 September 1862. He left a widow, Augusta, and 5 year old son Frederick. His second son Robert was born about two months after the battle.

This photograph was likely taken about the time of his enlistment in August 1862 and is from the FamilySearch database.

As you probably know, nearly all 1890 United States Census records were destroyed in a fire in 1921 leaving a permanent information gap familiar to historians and genealogists. Not so familiar, I expect, are a set of special veteran’s schedules the Bureau collected during the 1890 Census, most of which survived.

This Special Schedule was particularly valuable to me in learning about a mystery soldier of the 16th Connecticut Infantry.

He enlisted as Lewis Bulgick, a Private in Company H in August 1862, was wounded at Antietam on 17 September, and was discharged from the service for disability in February 1863.

I spent quite a bit of time trying to learn more about Private Bulgick, with little luck. Other regimental researchers before me have had this same problem – all the way back to his fellow veterans in the 1890s. I found a little for him in Massachusetts records of the 1860s and 70s, but nothing about his ancestry, birth, or death.

Then I stumbled upon a page of the 1890 Special Schedule for Southbridge, MA. Here it is (click to enlarge):

There on row 35 is the key: he also used the alias Louis Bolduc, his birth name, it turns out. With that I was easily able to find his Québécois parents and 17 (!) siblings, birth and death information, the works. Very satisfying.

I do not know why he used the Bulgick name instead of the one he was born with – but I believe he consciously chose it, it’s not just a phonetic mis-transcription: in addition to enlisting as Bulgick, he also gave that name to the 1860 and 1870 census enumerators and the Massachusetts towns where some of his 8 or more babies were born. Some of his children seem to have later used Bulgick (or variations) and some Bolduc.

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For much more detail about the history of the 1890 Special Schedule, see First in the Path of the Firemen by Kelee Blake in the National Archives’ journal Prologue for Spring 1996.

I got my copy of this particular page from Ancestry.com.