What is this?

Our exhibit, Making Connecticut, showcases over 500 objects, images, and documents from the CHS collection. “What is this?” posts will highlight an object from the exhibit and explore its importance in Connecticut history every other week. What is this object? What is the story behind it? To find out more,

The Statue on the Green

The Hartford photographer William G. Dudley took this photograph of a Civil War monument on the town green in Glastonbury shortly after it was erected to commemorate Frederick M. Barber and other Glastonbury men killed in the Civil War. Barber, a captain with the 16th Connecticut Volunteer Infantry, died on September 20, 1862 of wounds received in action at the Battle of Antietam. His widow Mercy dedicated the monument in 1913, more than fifty years after her husband’s death. Mrs. Barber lived for four more years and died in 1917 at the age of eighty-seven. This summer, Jay LIchtmann, a volunteer at the Connecticut Historical Society, scanned over 1000 of Dudley’s original glass negatives, and Sasha Agins, a student from Bryn Mawr, finished formatting and finishing online records begun a decade ago by yet another dedicated volunteer, Norm Hausman. It was Agins who identified the monument in the photograph and determined its location.

 

They Also Served

Miss Jordan, Miss Carpenter, and Miss Marsh appear in a photograph album from the 1860s that once belonged to Sergeant William Huntington of Lebanon, Connecticut and is now in the collections of the Connecticut Historical Society. Huntington was a member of the 8^th Connecticut Volunteers and was wounded at the Battle of Antietam on September 17, 1862. The three young women in this tintype were nurses who cared for him at the Armory Square Hospital in Washington, D.C. Huntington was fortunate; he recovered from his wounds and returned to active duty.  Because it was located near the steamboat landing, Armory Square Hospital was the first stop for badly wounded soldiers and received many of the worst casualties from the Southern battlefields. Between 1861 and 1865, it recorded the largest number of deaths of any military hospital in Washington. These three women would have seen a great deal of suffering and death, but we don’t know anything about them, except their names. If anyone knows anything about Miss Jordan, Miss Carpenter, or Miss Marsh, and can help CHS to tell their stories, please let me know. Another photograph from Huntington’s album is featured in These Honored Dead, an article about Memorial Day.