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Federal (USV)

Private

Thomas F. Good

(1842 - 1914)

Home State: Pennsylvania

Branch of Service: Infantry

Unit: 128th Pennsylvania Infantry

Before Antietam

Son and grandson of Lehigh County hotel owners, he was a 20 year old coach maker in Mechanicsville when he enlisted in Allentown in August 1862, and he mustered as Private, Company G, 128th Pennsylvania Infantry on 12 August in Harrisburg.

On the Campaign

Just over a month later he was wounded by a gunshot in action at Antietam on 17 September 1862.

The rest of the War

He was admitted to a US Army hospital in Frederick, MD on 27 September and transferred to Philadelphia on 9 November. He returned to duty and was captured (listed as missing) at Chancellorsville, VA on 2 May 1863 and spent two weeks at Libby Prison in Richmond, VA.

After the War

He worked briefly in a railroad shop in Jeffersonville, IN then returned East and clerked in the Black Bear Hotel in Allentown. He married in 1866 and they spent a few months in Missouri, then were back in Pennsylvania. He was a carpenter and wagoner in Slatington, and at the 1880 US Census was living in North Whitehall, Lehigh County, and was a road master, probably on the horse-drawn streetcar system in Allentown. He drove the Allentown-Saegerstown stage from 1884 to 1888 and moved to downtown Allentown in 1904.

He was active in city Republican politics, a ward supervisor for 7 years in the 1880s, a member of the G.W. Fuller Post No. 378 of the Grand Army of the Republic, and a Director of the poor house in Allentown. He was the Garfield School janitor from 1911 until his death at age 72 in 1914.

References & notes

Service information from Bates1 and the Register.2 Wound and hospital details from the Patient List.3 Personal details from a bio sketch in the Lehigh County Historical Society's History of Lehigh County, Pennsylvania, and a Genealogical and Biographical Record ... (Vol. II, 1914), Allentown newspapers, and from family genealogists. His gravesite is on Findagrave.

His birth name was probably Thomas F Guth; his father was Aaron Guth (1814-1887). He married Amanda Louisa Romig/Romich (1843-1931) in February 1866 and they had 5 sons; the last two, Thomas and Howard died young, the others, William, George, and Robert, took the surname Guth.

Birth

04/29/1842; Guthsville, Lehigh County, PA

Death

11/26/1914; Lehigh County, PA; burial in Neffs Union Cemetery, Neffs, PA

Notes

1   Bates, Samuel Penniman, History of the Pennsylvania Volunteers, 1861-65, Harrisburg: State of Pennsylvania, 1868-1871  [AotW citation 24024]

2   Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, Adjutant General's Office, Register of Pennsylvania Volunteers, 1861-1865, 16 volumes, Harrisburg  [AotW citation 24025]

3   National Museum of Civil War Medicine, and Terry Reimer, Frederick Patient List, Published 2018, first accessed 17 September 2018, <http://www.civilwarmed.org/explore/primary-sources/databases/frederickpatient/>, Source page: patient #4.712  [AotW citation 24026]