This year marks the 150th anniversary of the start of the Civil War and many men from northern Maine participated. During a recent walk through the older parts of Presque Isle’s Fairmount Cemetery I ran across many headstones for men who had been soldiers in various units of the Union Army — some even from the famous 20th Maine.
My grandmother, Mildred Belyea Griffin, wrote a brief family history in 1977 and one paragraph mentioned that her great-grandfather, Hazen B. Elliot of Castle Hill had been a solder in the Civil War and died of disease in Baltimore. For a Civil War soldier dying of a disease was more likely than a combat wound.
At the time I had tried to find out more about him and especially where he might be buried in Baltimore since I was now living in Maryland. When I requested the National Archives for his military records the researchers at the National Archives could not find any information.
A few months ago when looking over her history again I decided to do a search for his name on the Internet and it turned up. He was listed in the online version of the official history of the 11th Regiment Maine Infantry.
This time when I made my request to the National Archives I had a military unit to go with the name and received back a surprising number of documents. I discovered that at the age of 39 in 1864 Hazen B. Elliot was drafted into the Union Army as part of the Castle Hill quota and entered service on 13 October in Bangor. He was assigned to Company H of the 11th Regiment Maine Infantry.
The 11th Maine had been organized and mustered in at Augusta on 12 November 1861 and participated in many of the Union Army campaigns. Seven men were killed and 32 wounded in the fighting at Appomattox on the day Lee surrendered to Grant, 9 April 1865. Two men were wounded and three men were taken prisoner that day from Elliot’s Company. After Lee’s surrender his Regiment went to Richmond.
The documents about Private, then Corporal, Elliot contain detailed medical records and show that he was admitted to Hicks General Hospital in Baltimore on 23 October 1865 and died there on 2 November with the cause of death listed as dysentery. He left a wife and three children between 12 and 16 years of age.
He was buried in site 1368 of Loudon Park National Cemetery in Baltimore on 4 November. When I visited I found that the headstone has the wrong spelling of his name with two T’s instead of one. Many of the military and hospital records also have this variant. There is also a copy of a signed affidavit on 25 November 1865 by his wife, Eunice, requesting that his personal affects, mostly clothing, be sent to her.
I suspect there were letters between Elliot and his family. It would be very interesting to read what he wrote and thought about his experience as a soldier. I have never seen any. It is more than likely they have been lost but it is possible someone in the extended family has saved this correspondence. And maybe there is a photo of him in his uniform.
The 11th Regiment Maine Infantry lost seven officers and 115 enlisted men killed or mortally wounded during the war and four officers and 233 enlisted men by disease.
Editor’s note: Gary Hotham of Scaggsville, Md. grew up on a potato farm in Westfield and graduated from PIHS in 1968 and the University of Maine in 1972. He spent four years in the Air Force with part of that time in Japan and currently works for the Department of Defense. He has had assignments to Germany and England accompanied by his wife and daughter. He researched his great-great-great grandfather’s military service from “The Story of One Regiment: The Eleventh Maine Infantry Volunteers in the War of Rebellion,” compiled by A Committee of the Regimental Association published in 1896. Hotham’s e-mail address is HBE11thMaine@aol.com.
