The 16th Maine at Oak Ridge, and the men of Company A

My great-great-grandfather, Bray Wilkins, enlisted in the Sixteenth Maine Infantry at eighteen and was mustered in on 14 August 1862. He served in Company A, under Captain Charles A. Williams, who had enrolled him personally and witnessed his mother's consent.

This page exists for two reasons. The first is that forty of Bray's letters survive, unbroken from 1862 to 1865, and they are not only about him. They are full of other men's names. The second is that those other men have descendants, and the roster below is the only place I know of where all ninety-five of them appear together with their towns. If you are looking for one of them, he may be here.

Where the regiment came from

Company A was raised almost entirely from a small stretch of inland Maine. Seventeen of its men came from New Portland. Seven each from Harmony, Patten and Skowhegan. Five from Lexington. Four from Fairfield, Bray's own town, where the boy from the farm next door, Henry P. Closson, went into the same company two years older than he was.

That is what a volunteer company of 1862 actually was. Not a cross-section of a state but a handful of neighbouring townships, emptied of their young men in a few weeks, who then stood next to each other for three years. Bray wrote home from Virginia on 1 September 1862, two weeks into it:

Henry and I chum together. If it was not for him I do not know what I should do he is the onely one I have any thing to do with. We have got us a pourt Folio and both keep our paper in it and both sleep on the same bed. and when one [received] an extra ration we divide it. Bray Wilkins to his mother, Camp Whipple, Arlington House, 1 September 1862

Fredericksburg, 13 December 1862

The regiment's first hard fighting cost Company A four men killed outright, one dead of wounds a fortnight later, eight wounded and six missing. Bray wrote his brother about it eight days afterwards, and the part he chose to record was not the fighting but the retreat:

then the order came to pack up all our things without making any nois and then we crept back on the side of the river like a lot of fools. Bray Wilkins, 21 December 1862

Gettysburg, 1 July 1863

On the afternoon of the first day the Sixteenth Maine was on Oak Ridge, on the right of the Union line, in the First Brigade of Robinson's Second Division, First Corps. The line either side of it was giving way. General Robinson ordered the regiment, alone, to hold a hill that commanded the road so that the rest of the division could get off the field.

Two accounts of that order survive, and they do not use the same words. The regiment's monument on the battlefield carries it as an instruction "to hold the position at any cost." Lieutenant-Colonel Farnham, writing the regiment's official report on 19 August 1863, gives it differently:

We were then ordered, alone, by General Robinson, to take possession of a hill which commanded the road, and hold the same as long as there was a man left. Report of Lieut.-Col. Augustus B. Farnham, Sixteenth Maine Volunteers, 19 August 1863

They held, and then they were overrun. Driven back to the railroad cut and about to be taken, the men tore the national colours and the state flag from their staves, ripped them into pieces and hid the fragments on their persons rather than surrender them. Those scraps went south into the prisons in the men's pockets and came home to Maine, and veterans were still bringing them to reunions thirty years later.

Two hundred and seventy-five officers and men went into the fight that morning. Fewer than forty answered for the regiment on Cemetery Hill that evening.

Colonel Tilden was among the captured, surrendering to a skirmisher from Alabama who told him at a hundred feet to throw down his sword. He was sent to Libby Prison at Richmond and was later one of the party who escaped through the tunnel. The enlisted men, Bray among them, went to Belle Isle, the prison camp on an island in the James.

Seventeen men of Company A are documented at Gettysburg that day by name. Eleven were taken prisoner, five were wounded, and one was never accounted for.

What the men beside them thought

Thirty-five years afterwards, John D. Vautier of Philadelphia, the historian of the Eighty-eighth Pennsylvania Volunteers, wrote to a Maine veterans' magazine about the regiments he had known:

We know something of the First Maine Cavalry, and know they were a good regiment to stand by, but we knew more of the Sixteenth Maine, and when they fell back it was time for the other regiments to "git right out," and not stand on the order of going. The Maine Bugle, Campaign V (1898), page 107

The roster of Company A

Ninety-five men, as the company stood at its muster on 14 August 1862, with the ages and towns as printed. Ages were carried forward from enlistment and are generally a year behind by the end of 1863.

The company by town

New Portland 17. Harmony 7. Patten 7. Skowhegan 7. Lexington 5. Fairfield 4. Carratunk 3. Embden 3. Madison 3. Appleton, Augusta, Blanchard, Concord, Detroit, Hartland, Mayfield, Mount Vernon, Palmyra and West Waterville 2 each. One man each from Anson, Athens, Belmont, Brighton, Canaan, Chesterville, Litchfield, Moose River Plantation, Moscow, Rockland, Solon, St Albans, Starks, Stetson, Vienna, Wellington, Whitefield and Yarmouth, and one from New York.

What is not here

This is the company as it was raised. It is not the company as it ended.

Roughly fifty substitutes and drafted men joined the Sixteenth Maine between July and September 1863, from Portland, Bangor, Calais, Machias, Eastport, Saco, Hodgdon and Fort Fairfield, and one man entered on the rolls simply as "Ireland." They arrived while Bray was a prisoner at Richmond. He came back in late October 1863 to a company he did not recognise, and wrote home about it:

Our Regt No 600 men 500 of which is conscripts. We have 60 men in our Co and about 48 of them is conscripts. Bray Wilkins, 29 October 1863

Twelve of sixty were men he had gone to war with. Those later men are not on this page yet. They will be.

Sources

• Annual Report of the Adjutant General of the State of Maine, Appendix D, pages 466 to 469. The return of 1 December 1863, covering changes since 1 December 1862. This is the source of the ages, towns, ranks and most of the fates above.
• The published roster of the Sixteenth Maine Regiment, page 255, a later compilation, which carries transfers and discharges running to July 1865 that the 1863 return could not know.
• Report of the Maine Gettysburg Commission, Sixteenth Maine Regiment section, including the monument inscription and its casualty figures.
• Report of Lieutenant-Colonel Augustus B. Farnham, Sixteenth Maine Volunteers, 19 August 1863, covering 28 June to 24 July 1863.
• The Maine Bugle, Campaign V (1898).
• Forty letters of Bray Wilkins, 1862 to 1865, in family hands. Quotations from the 1862 and 1863 letters here are taken from a family transcription whose transcriber notes that she corrected spelling in places for clarity.