Tag Archives: Vermont

More than 6,000 people thronged the town on this cool, bright day in May 1905, some having arrived by train from as far away as Burlington and Rutland. The occasion was a special celebration of Memorial Day, a holiday that had arisen spontaneously in the years immediately after the Civil War to honor soldiers from both the North and the South.

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This small Vermont town played an instrumental part in arming the Union during the Civil War, recent research by a scholar preparing an exhibition for the
American Precision Museum has revealed.

An armory complex in town during the war centered on the three-story brick building on Main Street that now houses the Precision Museum, which is dedicated to telling the story of the mechanical arts and precision manufacturing in America.

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On Friday and Saturday, the Vermont Historical Society (VHS) will be holding an expo themed around Vermont’s involvement in the American Civil War at the
Tunbridge fairgrounds.

The event is intended to examine the role Vermonters played in the war as
well as the profound impact the conflict had on the development and history of
the state.

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Religion played a very important part in the U.S. Civil War, on both sides.

For decades before the war, religion motivated both Northern abolitionists and Southern apologists for slavery. The issue of slavery divided national religious groups into competing conferences, including Methodists, Presbyterians, and Baptists.

After the war broke out in 1861, “no previous war had directly engaged the numbers of chaplains who went to the battlefields between 1861 and 1865.

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After the debacle at Bull Run on July 21, there existed a perception the conflict between North and South would not be brief. Gov. Fairbanks, seeing the need for more troops, released a proclamation on July 30 calling for two more infantry regiments. He issued this order prior to receiving any request from the War Department, one that did arrive by telegraph several days later. He asserted “the events referred to (Bull Run) indicate clearly the necessity of exercising the discretionary power conferred on me by the aforesaid act for raising and organizing additional regiments.”

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 At the outbreak of the Civil War, James H. Walbridge, 34, son of a North Bennington woolens manufacturer, erstwhile California gold miner and member of a famous (or infamous) vigilante committee in San Francisco in 1856, organized a unit known as the Bennington Union Guards.

The Guards were the talk of Bennington. “This Company of Volunteers is making decided advancement in the science of war,” the May 23, 1861, Bennington Banner reported. “They are being drilled eight hours a day by our townsman, G.S. Ladd, Esq., an experienced officer of the Massachusetts School, who shows himself to be a thorough and efficient disciplinarian.”

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When I volunteered to do a series of articles on the Civil War from the Bennington area perspective, the first thing I wanted to look at was microfilm of this newspaper from a few months before the war started on April 12, 1861 on forward.

Newspapers have been called the rough “first draft of history,” and my experience over the years is that old newspapers contain vast amounts of fascinating and revealing details. The Banners from that era did not disappoint.

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