Last year Waitsfield scholar, historian and writer Alice Evans provided an alphabetical listing of boys and men with connections to the town of Waitsfield who served the Union cause in the American Civil War. Since that time, she has continued to explore the service records of 34 who are known to have died in the war (a 20.9% mortality rate).
Waitsfield lost almost an entire generation of young men. Of the nine soldiers younger than 21 at the time of their death, a third were just 18 (Luther Chase, Hiram Dike and Ireneaus Newcomb); another third were 19 (Charles Billings, George M. Jones and Lewis Spaulding); and the others were 20 (Bertrand Campbell, Cyrus Thayer, and Lathrop Thompson Stoddard).
John Baird, Albert Barnard, Alba Durkee, Loren Reed, Edwin Richardson, and Horace Stoddard all were 21 years old when they died. Charles Roulston and James Thayer were 22; Eli Gilson, Langdon Hadley and Oscar Reed were 23.
These additional Waitsfield men were all younger than 30 when they died: Hiram Luce (24), William H.H. Greenslit (26), Mitchell Biscorner and Matthias Joslin Bushnell (both 27), Mark Chase and John F. Jones (both 28) and James Maynard (29). Only four were 30 years old or older when they died: Manley Hoyt (30), Luther Ainsworth and Henry A. Dewey (both 32), and Willard Thayer (33).
Finally, three among the 34 who died in the war are cited separately here because their age at death does not appear in the primary sources Evans employed. Those soldiers were Solon Poland, Isaac Tewksbury and Henry Shaw, MD.
For many of the 34, their bodies were not returned to their families for burial. Soldiers’ remains might have never been recovered. Still others were interred in national cemeteries stretching from the Virginia peninsula to the North Carolina seacoast, and even at the infamous Andersonville prisoner of war camp.
For any reader wanting more information about these soldiers can contact Evans at
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