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G. Bronson
(1824 - 1898)
Home State: Connecticut
Branch of Service: Medical
Before Antietam
In 1860 he was a dentist in Danbury, CT. He enlisted on 19 October 1861 and mustered as a Private in Company A, 11th Connecticut Infantry on 24 October. He transferred to Company K on 27 December 1861.
On the Campaign
He was with his regiment on South Mountain on 14 September 1862, where he tended wounded soldiers ...
We established our hospital in a house about 200 yards below the battery and worked hard all night. Every house and church for miles around were occupied as hospitals.At Antietam on the 17th his regiment was part of the assault on the Rohrbach (later Burnside) Bridge. He wrote his wife about it on 21 September:
I was in company with the surgeons and we laid ourselves down between the hills of corn and in a lot west of the bridge being a corn field. I had a bag of bandages and some few other things in hand, we lay low I can assure you and the way the bullets whistled around us is better imagined than described ... the attack [on the bridge] was perfectly successful, we fell back to a brick house a mile in the rear and established a hospital.
I took off my coat to dress wounds, and met with a great loss. Some villain rifled my pockets of several packets of medicine, my fine tooth comb and what I valued most my needle book containing the little lock of hair you put in. No money would have bought it. It was not the value that I cared for, but the giver.
The rest of the War
He was appointed Hospital Steward on 1 September 1863, reenlisted on 13 December 1863, and mustered out on 21 December 1865 at City Point, VA.
After the War
He began receiving a veteran's pension for disability in October 1866, probably due to the pleurisy (lung disease) he suffered with during the war. By 1875 and to at least 1884 he was a practicing dentist at Pawling in Dutchess County, NY, just west of the Connecticut border.
References & notes
His service from the Record.1 The Antietam quote above from his letter as reproduced in Combat Readiness.2 Personal details from family genealogists, the US Census of 1860 & 1880, the NY State Census of 1875, and the Transactions of the Dental Society of the State of New York (1884). His gravesite is on Findagrave.
He married Mary Anne Lewis (c. 1831-1900) in September 1861 and they had a son Lewis Woodruff Bronson (1866-1939).
More on the Web
There's much more about George's service in a post by John Banks on his Civil War blog, including his photograph, contributed by great-great-granddaughter Mary Lou Pavlik, source of his picture above.
Birth
1824; New Milford, CT
Death
10/31/1898; Danbury, CT; burial in Wooster Cemetery, Danbury, CT
1 State of Connecticut, Adjutant General's Office, and AGs Smith, Camp, and Barbour, and AAG White, Record of Service of Connecticut Men in the Army and Navy of the United States during the War of the Rebellion, Hartford: Press of the Case, Lockwood, and Brainard Company, 1889, pp. 434, 436, 466 [AotW citation 30631]
2 Woodard, Scott C., and George C. Wunderlich and Wayne R. Austerman, Combat Readiness Through Medicine at the Battle of Antietam: the Human Face of our Bloodiest Day, Fort Sam Houston (TX): Borden Institute, 2022, p. 97 [AotW citation 30632]