Lewis Monroe Holcomb, Jr.

Orphaned at age 5, he was raised by his grandparents Ebenezer S. and Elmira Holcomb and possibly an aunt in Granby, CT. By 1862 he was a school teacher and farmer. He enlisted as a Private in Company E, 16th Connecticut Infantry and mustered on 28 July 1862.

He was with his Company in action at Antietam on 17 September 1862: "Lewis did first rate in the fight, and was ready in every call."

He was captured at Plymouth, NC on 20 April 1864 and was a prisoner in the camp at Andersonville, GA. He was probably paroled and released by December 1864 when he had a 30 day furlough home to Granby. He rejoined his Company but died, probably of disease, on 26 May 1865 at the Fairfax Seminary, VA.

His service from Ingersoll.1 His presence at Antietam from a letter of 21 September 1862 by his cousin Sgt R.H. Lee. Personal details from family genealogists and Lesley J. Gordon's research in her A Broken Regiment: The 16th Connecticut's Civil War (2014). His gravesite is on Findagrave, and he also has a stone (cenotaph) in Pine Hill Cemetery, Westfield, MA. Thanks to James Silliman for a transcription of that 21 September letter (original in the Salmon Brook Historical Society, Granby, CT).

His mother Mary Sheldon Hedges (b. 1820) died in 1844 when he was 3 years old. His father killed himself two years later. According to the Ottawa [IL] Free Trader of 30 October 1846:

Mr. Daniel F. Olcott of Hartford Ct. and Lewis M. Holcomb of Granby, were found dead on the 14th inst. in one of the rooms of the U.S. Hotel at Hartford. Holcomb having shot Olcott with a pistol and then killed himself according to the verdict of the coroner’s jury. The difficulty arose about a suit in court regarding an account of three hundred dollars.

03/08/1841; Hampden County, MA

05/26/1865; Fairfax, VA; burial in Alexandria National Cemetery, Alexandria, VA