DeWitt Clinton Baxter

Publisher of "The Baxter Panoramic Business Directory" (Philadelphia) both before and after the war, he was listed variously as an engraver, designer, and artist.

In April 1861 he was Lieutenant Colonel of the 19th Pennsylvania Volunteers, but when that three-month enlistment expired, he organized and led the 72nd Pennsylvania Volunteers, "Baxter's Fire Zouaves."

The 72nd met with severe and prolonged fighting and heavy losses as the Second Division of the corps advanced to the Dunker Church area and was hit in the flank and driven from the field. In a very few minutes, the 72nd Pennsylvania suffered the third highest casualties of any Federal regiment that day - 38 killed, 163 wounded and 36 missing.

He led the regiment at the Battles of Fredericksburg, Gettysburg and the Wilderness. He was wounded at Gettysburg during the Philadelphia Brigade's famed defense of the Angle during Pickett's Charge

After the war, Baxter was occupied variously, as a naval officer at the Custom House (1869) and in the mid-seventies as a principal in the Keystone Portable Forge Company. He may have revived his Panoramic Directory business in the late 1870s. Originally buried in Monument Cemetery in Philadelphia, he was reinterred in Lawnview in 1956.

Source: Heitman, Francis Historical Register and Dictionary of the United States Army 1789-1903, Washington, US Government Printing Office, 1903.

See some nice work about his Philadelphia panoramas and his obituary from Bryn Mawr, the source for much of the material above.

3/9/1829 in MA

5/9/1881; Philadelphia, PA; burial in Longview Cemetery, Rockledge, PA