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L.R. Fortescue
(1838 - 1915)
Home State: Pennsylvania
Branch of Service: Infantry
Before Antietam
In 1860 he was a 21 year old railroad conductor living with his parents and 7 younger siblings in Philadelphia, PA. He enrolled there on 16 April 1861 and mustered as First Lieutenant, Company A, 29th Pennsylvania Infantry on 1 July. He was detailed to the Signal Corps in August 1861 and had duty along the Potomac in Maryland, was assigned to General Banks in the Shenandoah Valley, then with General Pope into August 1862.
On the Campaign
By 2 September 1862 he was posted to Maryland Heights near Harpers Ferry and was there until (probably) chased off by Confederates about 12 September.
The rest of the War
He was at Fredericksburg in December 1862 and at Gettysburg, PA in July 1863. He was captured near there by Confederate Cavalry on 5 July and a prisoner, first at Libby Prison in Richmond, VA, then at Macon, GA and Charleston, SC to 1 March 1865, when he was exchanged near Wilmington, NC. He was discharged on 12 March 1865.
After the War
By 1870 he was married and back in Philadelphia, in 1880 he was a bookkeeper there, and by 1889 in the insurance business. He was Chief Clerk of the Philadelphia City Controller's Office in 1893. In 1910 he was retired and living in The Frontenac, a large new apartment building at Broad and Oxford Streets in Philadelphia.
References & notes
His basic service from Bates1 and the Card File,2 with details from Brown,3 source also of his picture. Maryland Campaign details from Major Myer's Report. Personal details from family genealogists, the US Census of 1860-1910, and The City of Philadelphia as it Appears in the Year 1893 [PDF online]. His gravesite is on Findagrave.
He married Mildred A E "Polly" Maule (1835-1923) in July 1864 (?).
More on the Web
His 1863-64 prisoner-of-war diary is in the Wilson Special Collections Library at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill [finding aid].
His wartime memoir was published by the University of Tennessee Press as Service with the Signal Corps : The Civil War Memoir of Captain Louis R. Fortescue (2015), edited by J. Gregory Acken.
Birth
06/23/1838; Philadelphia, PA
Death
11/20/1915; Philadelphia, PA; burial in West Laurel Hill Cemetery, Bala Cynwyd, PA
1 Bates, Samuel Penniman, History of the Pennsylvania Volunteers, 1861-65, Harrisburg: State of Pennsylvania, 1868-1871 [AotW citation 28731]
2 Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, Adjutant-General, Pennsylvania Civil War Veterans' Card File, 1861-1866, Published <2005, first accessed 01 July 2005, <http://www.digitalarchives.state.pa.us/archive.asp?view=ArchiveIndexes&ArchiveID=17> [AotW citation 28732]
3 Brown, J. Willard, The Signal Corps, U.S.A. in the War of the Rebellion, Boston: U.S. Veteran Signal Corps Association, 1896, before pg. 233; pp. 227, 324, 370-71, 772 [AotW citation 28733]