Cabin_ Two Brothers, a Dream, and Five Acres in Maine - Lou Ureneck [80]
Toward the end of June 1863, a rumor reached the Confederate Army that there were shoes to be had in the town of Gettysburg, in south central Pennsylvania. The Southern army had been fighting in bare feet; a Confederate general sent troops to get the shoes. At the same time, two brigades of Union cavalry had been sent to secure the town. There were other Union troops coming up behind those two cavalry brigades, and among them was the 16th Maine. Neither side expected an encounter, and despite orders from Lee not to engage the enemy before he had pulled together his spread-out army, the Confederate general who had sent for the shoes engaged the Union cavalry. In hours, the most consequential battle of the Civil War was under way. Hosea was in the middle of it.
The Union generals decided to hold their ground at a Lutheran seminary on a small hill west of the town. The Maine boys were positioned behind a rail fence near the seminary, in full view of the enemy two hundred yards away. There was furious firing between the lines, and the Maine regiment was ordered to make a bayonet charge. It drove the Southerners into the woods. The spread-out Confederate Army began to converge on Gettysburg, and it bore down on Seminary Ridge from the north and east. The Union Army retreated, its lines crumbling. The Union command saw that it might save its army if it could slow the Confederate force. The 16th Maine was ordered to remain at the ridge and “hold it at any cost.” The mass of Confederate troops fell on the 16th Maine, and soon it was surrounded. The Maine commander broke his sword in the ground, and the men who had not fallen gathered around their regimental flag, refusing to relinquish it to a rebel officer. They tore it and shoved the pieces in their shirts. The men, including Hosea, were taken prisoner. Wounded again, Hosea was held at a Richmond prison and placed in its hospital. He died there on November 5 of typhus.
The war changed the hill country of western Maine. The boys who left to fight saw new lands and places that were easier to farm, with less cruel climates and fewer rocks, and the countryside began to empty out. Farms were abandoned; fields were slowly reclaimed by the forest. In 1860, Stoneham’s population was 460. Today it is 255.
The New England landscape that remains a lockbox of America’s idea of a virtuous and ideal past—of skating ponds, village churches and flinty but provident family farms—had in fact been in a state of constant change since the arrival of the first Europeans. The end of the great rebellion brought one more change, though it was one from which the region never fully recovered. Gone were the multitude of farms, the small manufacturers, the lively commerce with Europe and the Caribbean, the village life and the steady stream of national leaders.
The question that I pondered as I walked back and forth to the cabin was this: Does the decline of this corner of New England, or at least the disappearance of the old symbols of austerity, selfsustenance and ingenuity that it so firmly embodied, prefigure a decline of the best part of the nation’s character? Could I read some warning to America from this little piece of intervale that had so freely given its blood to maintain the Union but had lost its future? Here was the arc: from Eden, to frontier folk, to settled farms, to industrialization and war—and, finally, to long economic decline. Even the wood in the furniture for sale in the bigbox stores where local residents pushed their shopping carts was now cut, turned, shaped and