Bath Nurse Cared For The Gettysburg Wounded

by Brian Swartz

Adapted from Maine at War

Prior to the Civil War, Sarah Sampson lived quietly in Bath with her husband, Charles A.L. Sampson. He carved figureheads for wooden boats built in Bath and elsewhere.

When Charles joined the 3rd Maine Infantry Regiment as a captain in spring 1861, Sarah tagged along as he took his company upriver to Augusta, where the regiment formed prior to mustering into the U.S. Army. Soon Charles became the 3rd Maine’s lieutenant colonel, and Sarah accompanied him as a nurse as the regiment shipped to Washington, D.C.

Sarah cared for sick and wounded Maine soldiers after First Manassas, during the Peninsula Campaign, and after the December 1861 battle at Fredericksburg. Shortly after the fighting ended at Gettysburg, she headed to that Adams County town with nurse Ruth S. Mayhew, a Rockland widow temporarily living in Portland.

Both volunteered as nurses to care for the wounded men — 20,995 according to the official count — created by the battle.

Sampson and Mayhew represented the Maine Camp Hospital Association, based in Portland. The organization raised funds to keep nurses in the field and to buy and ship supplies to them. Donations — bandages, blankets, and anything else beneficial to hospitalized soldiers — were always welcome, and the MCHA often shipped dry goods to the nurses, too.

Potatoes, dry beans, dried apples, and canned foods were particularly welcome.

Sampson and Mayhew caught a train

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to Baltimore and then to a Northern Central Railroad train. The Northern ran almost due north from Baltimore to the Susquehanna River, skirted its southern shore to Marysville (upstream from Harrisburg), and crossed the river there.

The Northern connected with the Hanover Railroad at Hanover Junction, a wye-shaped interchange south of York, Pennsylvania. The three-story, wood-framed depot standing between the two railroad lines had wooden boarding platforms extending to the tracks.

Sampson and Mayhew reached Hanover Junction at 1 a.m. on a mid-July day; neither nurse indicated the date. Darkness lay heavy over the depot, and the nurses crowded into its entryway and stairwell with 28 other men and women.

A train ride being noisy and motion-filled in that era, passengers were tired and hungry. A Harrisburg-bound train removed waiting passengers at 4 a.m. Fired upon during the Peninsula Campaign, Sarah Sampson was usually prepared for times like this. Mayhew watched as Sampson, “who was the moving spirit of all present, proposed making tea. “So, opening her trunk which seems to contain an inexhaustible supply of good things,” Sampson took out and “lighted the spirit lamp, and using her trunk for a table, she made tea for some weary travelers,” Mayhew said. Sampson removed other items from her trunk, too. Eyes widened all around her as “she served out with crackers and cookies.

“Part of our company were soldiers on guard,” and they partook of the repast, too, Mayhew noticed. The soldiers were there because Confederate troops had torn up the railroad tracks and burned the turntable at Hanover Junction prior to Gettysburg.

“The tea somehow seemed to loosen our tongues, for we were more voluble after it,” Mayhew said. Sampson joined the conversation; fellow passengers would have certainly expressed their gratitude, and they might have heard tales of Sampson’s wartime adventures, including being aboard a James River hospital ship accurately shelled by Jeb Stuart’s artillery.

Warmed by the hot tea and refreshments, the passengers stirred into activity. “Taking the dipper that we had used for a water pail, we filled it at the pump and poured it on each other’s heads,” Mayhew recalled. “We then seated ourselves on the floor and brushed our hair.”

A Gettysburg-bound train clattered into the junction, which the passengers left at 9 a.m. Sampson and Mayhew sat on boxes and valises in a cattle car and reached Gettysburg later that day.

Sampson stayed four weeks at Gettysburg, mostly at the Third Corps’ hospital, which sheltered many badly wounded Maine soldiers. The army consolidated the various hospitals intothe much larger Camp Letterman, set up about one mile east of Gettysburg, by a grove of trees located near the York Pike and the railroad running east to Hanover Junction.

Sampson definitely cared for soldiers at Camp Letterman, too. Sometime before mid-August, a photographer posed a group of people outside a U.S. Sanitary Commission tent at the hospital.

Of the eleven people in the photograph, three are women. Two stood; the woman sitting beside the table while holding a ribbon-decorated hat on her lap has been identified as Sarah Sampson.

While working at the Third Corps’ hospital, she collected “the effects of all who died from our State.” She also visited every hospital to get “the names of those [Mainers] who have died there,” she wrote Governor Abner Coburn.

Sampson brought the dead soldiers’ effects with her upon returning to Washington, D.C. on Saturday, August 15. “I left our soldiers very reluctantly at Gettysburg; they needed my service much, and urged me to remain,” but she “had no instructions to remain,” she told Coburn.

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