A Time to Remember

The year was 1890 and the author, who had chronicled the history of Stoneham from its early settlement, was turning to the cataclysmic event that changed America forever. He wrote: “Twenty-five years have passed since the close of the great Rebellion.”

The author, William B. Stevens, was also a judge. A grandson of the Rev. John Stevens, the longest serving minister in the Congregational Church, William had grown up in Stoneham, attended Phillips Academy, and enrolled at Dartmouth College. In 1862, after his first year, he had enlisted in Company C of the 50th Massachusetts Regiment. The Civil War had started.

Under General Nathaniel Banks, Stevens participated in the Siege of Port Hudson and the Battle of Vicksburg, which opened the Mississippi River to Union control.

After one year, Stevens returned to Dartmouth to study law. Two years after the war he was admitted to the Suffolk County Bar.

Now, almost a generation later, he was compelled to account for the men and women of Stoneham who fought, supported, suffered and died for the Union cause.

“Those were stirring times in Stoneham, and all who love the old town are proud to dwell upon her record,” Stevens wrote. “No town was more patriotic, none more prompt in hurrying to the front, or furnished more men in proportion to her population.”

From colonial battles to the American Revolution, Stevens noted, Stoneham had been quick to respond, sending more than its allotted quota. In a town of some 340 residents, 98 men from Stoneham served in the Revolutionary War, virtually every able-bodied man.

Eighty-six years later, after the attack on Fort Sumter, President Abraham Lincoln had called for 75,000 volunteers to form a provisional army, and Stoneham was again quick to respond. The day after Lincoln’s proclamation, Captain John H. Dike presented himself at the State House and, as Stevens puts it, “begged the privilege of calling out his [militiamen] in obedience to the President's call.”

At 2 a.m. the next morning, Captain Dike was awakened with a message from the governor. Bring your men and come to Boston. At 6 a.m. the Stoneham Company was summoned, new recruits were added, and the men made final preparations. Stevens tells what follows:

“The people had assembled in a great multitude, wild with patriotic enthusiasm. It was an occasion such as Stoneham had never witnessed. The company departed from the square amid the ringing of bells, waving of hand kerchiefs and tumultuous cheers.”

Joining other volunteers from all across Massachusetts, the Stoneham militiamen arrived two days later in Baltimore, in time to participate in the first skirmish of the Civil War. The date was April 19, the same date 86 years before that Stoneham militiamen had fought at the Battle of Lexington.

No one then could have foreseen the extent of the bloodshed and devastation of the Civil War. Hundreds of thousands of men would die, be maimed or injured. Stoneham, a town of a little over 3,200, would supply over 400 men and one woman, a nurse, to the war effort. Fifty-four would be killed in battle, die from wounds, disease, or in Confederate prison camps.

Their names are engraved on the Civil War Memorial in Lindenwood Cemetery. On Monday, Memorial Day, we remember and honor them.