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E.A. Denicke
(1840 - 1909)
Home State: New York
Branch of Service: Infantry
Before Antietam
He came to New York from Bremen, Germany in October 1848. Then age 21, he enlisted on 22 July 1861 in New York City and mustered as a Private in Company H, 68th New York Infantry on 1 August. He was commissioned 2nd Lieutenant of Company E a week later. He transferred to Company G on 1 January 1862 and was promoted to First Lieutenant of Company C on 17 July 1862. He was detailed to the Signal Corps in March 1862 and assigned to the Army of the Potomac.
On the Campaign
By 4 September 1862 he was at Great Falls on the Potomac River above Washington, DC and by 20 September he was at a signal station near Downsville, MD between Sharpsburg and Williamsport.
The rest of the War
He was promoted to Captain on 17 December 1862 and commissioned First Lieutenant, US Signal Corps on 3 March 1863. He was honored by brevet to Captain, US Volunteers in March 1865 for his war service and mustered out on 20 December 1865.
After the War
He went to San Francisco in 1866 and was in the wholesale grocery business and manufactured cigars. He became a naturalized US citizen there in August 1867, and by 1880 and to at least 1890 was a brewer - owner of the Fredericksburg Brewery in San Jose. By 1900 he was also a banker - President of the Germania Trust Company - in San Francisco, and identified himself as a merchant there in 1907. He was a Regent of the University of California (1896-1900) and left an endowment to the Ernst A. Denicke Memorial Faculty Loan Fund.
References & notes
His basic service from the State of New York1 with details from Brown2 source also of his picture. Maryland Campaign events from Captain B.F. Fisher's Report. Personal details from family genealogists, the US Census of 1880, a bio sketch in The Builders of a Great City: San Francisco's Representative Men (Vol. 1, 1891), and his US passport applications of 1900 and 1907. He's seen in University and MOLLUS records as Ernst August Denicke.
He married Ida Scheunemann-Pott (1853-) in 1871 and they had 3 children.
More on the Web
His family papers and photographs are in the Bancroft Library Collection, UC Berkley [finding aid].
Birth
07/13/1840; Hanover, GERMANY
Death
02/11/1909; Geneva, SWITZERLAND
1 State of New York, Adjutant-General, Annual Report of the Adjutant General of the State of New York [year]: Registers of the [units], 43 Volumes, Albany: James B. Lyon, State Printer, 1893-1905, For the Year 1901, Ser. No. 27, pg. 1152 [AotW citation 28683]
2 Brown, J. Willard, The Signal Corps, U.S.A. in the War of the Rebellion, Boston: U.S. Veteran Signal Corps Association, 1896, pg. 757 [AotW citation 28684]