Touch the Elbow - Blogging the Civil War

Note from Donald: this represents the final installment of my trip to New Hampshire from Sept. 29 to Oct. 2nd. In case you missed the first two postings and would like to read them, Part One appeared on October 10th and Part Two was added on October 11th.

On the drive to Milford. N.H. a Randy Newman song floated around in my head, as if in answer to a question I was asking myself. Amherst is a neighboring town and where William H. Holmes died. If Holmes, a destitute, tuberculosis ridden alcoholic had knocked on his door in Milford, would Captain William W. Hemenway have offered help? I want to believe he would have. But then again, maybe not. For the full story on Holmes, read Part One of Chasing the Dead in New Hampshire.

Tin can at my feet,
Think I’ll kick it down the street.
Yeah, that’s the way you treat a friend.

Right before me
Signs implore me
Help the needy,
And show them the way,
Human kindness is overflowin’
And I think it’s going to rain today.

Randy Newman

Regardless of whether he would have lent a helping hand or not, Hemenway must have sympathized with the fact that I had spent hours tromping around cemeteries in Amherst and Franklin, NH. Or maybe he just appreciated the fact that I had purchased a large basket of white mums to place on his grave.

Start with this fact. Milford, N.H. has five cemeteries and I had no idea which one he was buried in. I stopped at Riverside Cemetery simply because it was the first one I passed when I drove into the town. As luck would have it there were cemetery workers on duty and my luck got even better when they informed me the town had a computerized database of internments for all five cemeteries. A quick phone call confirmed Hemenway was buried at Riverside and, after obtaining the lot and grave number, they escorted me to the site. Finding his grave otherwise would have been a daunting task, Riverside being the largest cemetery by far of those I had visited over a three-day period.

I walked back to the car in order to park closer to the grave, as I didn’t favor lugging a fairly heavy plant a couple of hundred yards on foot. During that walk I stopped to take pictures of some unique monuments before winding up at the cemetery gates. After snapping off two pictures of the gates I was back at the car when a green Jeep Wrangler pulled up in front of me. In one of those weird coincidences of timing, my nephew Ian explained he was on his way to work and saw me in front of the gates.


William Hemenway was born in Lexington, MA, the son of Daniel and Sophia. He was twenty when he married Mary Octavia Clapp in 1857 at Boston and the father of two when a mortar shell streaked across the darkness enveloping Charleston Harbor. Six weeks after the surrender of Ft. Sumter he was enlisted as a Sergeant in Co. I of the 18th Massachusetts Infantry.

If nothing else, Hemenway was tough and a natural born leader. By July 1862 he had survived the rigors and hardships of the Peninsular campaign and been promoted to 2nd Lieutenant. By virtue of command decisions emanating from Army headquarters, the 18th Massachusetts did not see action during any of the Seven Days Battles. That was all to change on August 30th at a place that became known as Second Manassas, or Second Bull Run. When the smoke cleared the Union army was in tatters and in organized retreat toward Centreville, VA, led by a humiliated and disoriented John Pope. Of 325 men from the 18th Massachusetts who entered the battle under the command of Capt. Stephen Thomas, 42 officers and men were dead, another 99 were wounded, and 25 reported as missing in action. Hemenway was among the wounded, but not seriously enough that he was away from the Regiment. He, in fact, witnessed the slaughter at Antietam from a hill where the Fifth Corps was held in reserve and saw his second action at the Battle of Shepherdstown, West Virginia. After recrossing the Potomac River into Maryland he, along with the rest of First Brigade of the First Division of the Fifth Corps, surely would have seen the drown bodies of the 118th Pennsylvania floating downstream in the swift current.

Hemenway was not so fortunate with his second wound, incurred when struck by a shell fragment in the right leg at Fredericksburg on December 13th. He was gone from the Regiment for nearly two months while undergoing treatment at Georgetown Seminary Hospital and recuperating at home. During his furlough home he laid eyes on his daughter Mary Grace, who been born in September 1862, for the first time. While his recovery was seemingly complete, Hemenway was plagued by pain from the wound for the rest of his life and unable to stand or sit for extended periods of time.

His promotion to 1st Lieutenant on February 25, 1863 had nothing to do with merit, but rather death harvesting lieutenants in the Eighteenth. As such, he took up the march again in 1863, seeing combat at Chancellorsville and Gettysburg, and, after being placed in command of Company F, during the Mine Run Campaign, and Rappahannock Station.

I can attest first hand to the debilitating effects of sunstroke. When I was a kid playing baseball on a scorching hot day, the world suddenly grew black. I don’t remember this, but was told I dropped my glove, started walking off the field, and fell flat on my face after going about five feet. At the Wilderness on May 5, 1864 men fell in droves from sunstroke, Hemenway being one of them. He wouldn’t return to the Regiment until a month later. Capt. William H. Winsor, also struck by sunstroke at the Wilderness, complained of wildly blinding headaches throughout the duration of his life.

Hemenway was promoted to the rank of Captain and placed in command of Company K on June 4, 1864, following the death of Capt. Charles F. Pray. Pray had been killed at Bethesda Church the previous day, when a gunshot tore off his leg. Hemenway, however, was never mustered as a Captain and was instead discharged from military service on September 2, 1864 at the expiration of his three-year enlistment as a First Lieutenant.

Home was Wrentham, MA for the next three years, until he moved his family to Natick, MA. Employed as a bookkeeper and perhaps undergoing a midlife crisis, Hemenway changed locations and jobs, taking up as the printer and publisher of the Milford Enterprise and Wilton, N.H. Journal newspapers in 1875. Two of his children, Ralph and Carrie would follow in his footsteps, later taking positions with the Boston Globe. Hemenway invested himself in the Milford community, joining the O.W. Lull G.A.R. Post No. 11 and served as Post Commander in 1884, while his wife Mary was a charter member of the Women’s Relief Corps. Hemenway may have very well advised the 18th Massachusetts Veterans Association of the circumstances of William Holmes’ death in Amherst at the 1901 reunion. His days probably passed quietly and peacefully until his death at age 81 on March 9, 1918.

There are always things you think of after the fact. For example I wished I had checked the Census records before I left, because I then could have taken a picture of the house the Hemenway family resided in. As with the towns of Amherst and Franklin, Hemenway, if brought back to life, probably wouldn’t have noticed much change in Milford. Certainly he would have recognized the town hall built in 1869 and the Odd Fellows Hall located two buildings away. He would have been equally familiar with the First Congregational Church, which has stood since 1833, the John Shepard House of 1741 construction, the Milford Cotton and Woolen Manufacturing Company buildings erected in 1810 and converted to Senior Citizen housing in 1983, as well as Centenial High School, which opened in 1894 and is now known as Bales Elementary, and the Civil War monument standing on a park like rotary in the town center. However, he probably would have been stumped by the existence of a 7-11 located about a quarter of a mile from the downtown area.

Hemenway would not have known Harriet Wilson, who left Milford probably ten years before he took up residence. She was a black servant who, in 1859, published an autobiography, the first book by a black female ever published in the United States. Hers was not a happy tale, but one of mistreatment by her employers. The book, Our Nig, or Sketches from the Life of a Free Black, faded into obscurity until rediscovered by Dr. Henry L. Gates, Jr. of Harvard University in 1983. That discovery led to an effort to establish a memorial to Harriet Wilson in the town. From what I’ve learned fund raising efforts are still ongoing and thus far stand at close to half of the $112,000 needed to pay for the memorial. Her story, which is available in paperback, would certainly provide insight into the isolated existence of a free black woman and the apparent racist attitudes found in Pre-Civil War New Hampshire.