Author describes letters that follow footsteps of Civil War brothers
Carleton Young reads from a letter of Henry Martin during a program about his book held at Upper St. Clair Township Library.
Francis Martin
William Henry Martin
Although he long has been a history buff, the Civil War never was quite up Carleton Young’s alley.
Finding a box full of soldiers’ correspondences from the 1860s changed all that.
The Castle Shannon resident’s book, “Voices from the Attic: The Williamstown Boys in the Civil War,” tells the stories of brothers Francis and Henry Martin through their writings as they served the Union Army.
And as he told the audience during a recent program at Upper St. Clair Township Library, not only did he transcribe the Martins’ letters, he followed in their footsteps from their New England hometown to the sites of famous battles in Virginia and Maryland.
Actually, the retired Thomas Jefferson High School teacher had plenty of help transcribing the letters that he discovered in his parents’ Churchill home. His wife, Carole, joined in the effort along with friends Edd and Nancy Hale, and Bill Lutz.
Young called it “a long, slow process.”
“They had paper shortages. He doesn’t want to waste another sheet of paper,” he said about Henry, the younger brother, who enlisted in 1862 and frequently wrote back to his family. “So he turns the letter sideways and writes directly across what he’s already written. “This was called cross-writing, and it was relatively common among Union soldiers.”
And it was very common among the Martins.
“Another thing that would happen was, it would seem like on Page 1, often times he would write slowly and carefully, relatively easy to read,” Young said. “But then as the letter would go on, he’d start to get sloppy.”
In the meantime, he and his wife started traveling to find out more about Francis and Henry, starting in their birthplace of Williamstown, Vt., which had a population of 3,389 in the 2010 census. Still standing there on Route 14 is the 200-plus-year-old church the Martin family attended. And just down the street is a Civil War monument.
“We start reading all the names on it, and our two soldiers are not listed,” Young said. “We thought, this is crazy. We have their letters, and they’re addressed here, and we have their military records. We know they’re from here.”
Local politics apparently is to blame.
“By going through old town records, we found that when they built this monument in 1869, the town decided to put on only the names of the soldiers who were drafted to fill the town quota,” Young explained. “Our two brothers enlisted, so they weren’t included.”
Also on Route 14 is the Williamstown Historical Society, where the Youngs posed a question:
“We said, ‘We know this is a century and a half ago. But did you ever hear of a local farmer named Chester Martin?’ And the person with the historical society said, ‘Oh, well, sure. His house is right down the road.”
So they had the opportunity to visit where the letter-writers lived, which now is an assisted-living home, and then they went to West Hill Cemetery, where the brothers are buried.
Other journeys took them to places where they served in battle, especially Henry, whose actual first name was William. One such spot was Fort Monroe, Va., where he fought in the Peninsula Campaign, the Union’s first major offensive of the war.
“We drove up and down the peninsula, going to all the places Henry had been to,” Young said about the land between the York and James rivers.
One of them was a spot for fighting during the Battle of Yorktown (April and May 1862) known as Dam No. 1.
“I posted a picture on Facebook that said, ‘Driving my wife to another dam Civil War site,'” Young quipped.
A more somber visit was to Sharpsburg, Md., and Antietam National Battlefield, the Sept. 17, 1862, site of the bloodiest single-day battle in U.S. history.
“One of the park rangers took us to the hillside where Henry sat, looking down over the field where he watched this horrible carnage taking place,” Young said.
He had brought along the soldier’s letter describing the horrors of the battle’s aftermath.
“I showed this to one of the park historians,” Young recalled. “He said he had heard stories that, supposedly, there were so many dead bodies to deal with, the soldiers just started burning the bodies. He said he’d never before seen a firsthand account, and here it was, in this letter. “
Another national military park is in Fredericksburg, Va., but Henry was elsewhere during the December 1862 battle.
“The area where Henry was fighting has become developed,” Young said. “Henry was right around Deep Run Creek, and at that spot today is a Wawa convenience store. But the creek’s still there, so we were able to figure it all out. We had copies of the letters and walked past the gas pumps and past the convenience store and up along the creek, and found where Henry was positioned.”
Francis eventually joined him in battle, and what became of them is revealed in “Voices from the Attic.”
Now, there’s something to add to your summer reading list.