Augustus Henry Lung

A farmer's son, he was ordained a Baptist minister in 1857 and was pastor of the First Baptist Church in Canandaigua, NY and quite well-off by 1860. On 2 January 1862, then 35 years old, he enrolled and mustered as Chaplain of the 33rd New York Infantry.

He was with his regiment in Maryland and assisted surgeons with the wounded at on South Mountain on 14 and 15 September 1862, and in and near the Sunken Road at Antietam on 17 September. He later wrote of that day:

Here, too, were scenes that were heart-rending. At one end of the line would begin the cry, 'give me water;' another would take it up, 'give me water,' and so it would go on until the cry for water would die away in the distance. After a little silence the cry would be, 'my God must I die,' and another would repeat this, and then another, until it was heard indistinctly in the far off line. I returned from the field weary and sickened; and, about eleven o'clock, hitching my horse to one corner of the fence, nestled down in the other till morning.

In the days after the Battle of Antietam he tended to wounded soldiers at the regiment's field hospital in the East Woods on the Hoffman Farm near Keedysville, MD with Assistant Surgeon Curran. He ministered to the wounded again at Fredericksburg in December and Chancellorsville, VA in May 1863, and mustered out with his regiment at the end of their 2 year term on 2 June 1863 in Geneva, NY.

In 1870 he lived in the Germantown neighborhood of Philadelphia but by 1880 was in Camden, NJ. His final post was in Rochester, NY. In a genealogical letter to her children, his granddaughter Catherine White noted:

Grandfather Lung "died in the saddle," as he had always wanted to do, being stricken in the pulpit and never regaining consciousness. At the conclusion of a powerful sermon he had said "let us bow in prayer" and put his head on his hands on the pulpit. When the ensuing silence became alarmingly too long, two deacons went up and found him in a coma ... he died a few days later ...

His military service from the State of New York.1 Antietam hospital detail from Nelson.2 The battle quote above from his letter published in the Ontario (NY) Republican Times of 15 October 1862. Personal details from family genealogists, the Lewisburg (PA) Chronicle of 20 July 1855, and the US Census of 1850-1880. His gravesite is on Findagrave.

See much more about Chaplain Lung from Dave Lay in his fine bio sketch of Chaplain Lung on Facebook, source of the Antietam quote, some personal details, and the picture above, from a photograph sold on ebay.

11/01/1826; Susquehanna County, PA

02/03/1886; Rochester, NY; burial in Woodlawn Cemetery, Canandaigua, NY