Claudius C. Margerum

An 18 year old cigar maker's son in Suffield, he enlisted as a Private in Company D, 16th Connecticut Infantry on 11 August 1862.

He was wounded by a gunshot to his head in action at Antietam on 17 September 1862.

He was admitted to a US Army hospital in Frederick, MD on 28 September and sent on to Philadelphia on 30 September 1862. He was promoted to Corporal on 16 April 1864 but was captured at Plymouth, NC on 20 April 1864 and was a prisoner at Andersonville, GA. He was paroled on 28 February 1865 and was in Camp Parole, Annapolis, MD to about 22 April, when he was sent back to the regiment in North Carolina. He survived the 24 April 1865 collision between the transport Massachusetts and the Black Diamond on the Potomac River to muster out with the regiment on 24 June 1865 at New Bern, NC.

By 1880 he was a tobacconist in Springfield, MA. In the 1904 Springfield Municipal Register, he was a cigar manufacturer and lived at 56 Forest Street. He served on the Board of Public Works there by 1908 and to at least 1911.

Service information from Ingersoll1 and the Record.2 Antietam wound and hospital details from the Patient List,2 as Claudius Morgan. Post-POW details thanks to Edward Boots' Roster from the Civil War Plymouth Pilgrims Descendants Society. Personal details from family genealogists and the US Census of 1860, 1880, and 1900. His gravesite is on Findagrave.

He married Elizabeth M. Holmes (1842-1905) and they had daughters Jennie (1868-1870) and Grace (1872-1885). He married again, Annie Fellows (1847-1927) in August 1907 in Worchester, MA.

There is a portrait of him in the Connecticut State Library [finding aid PDF].

03/29/1844; West Suffield, CT

08/09/1921; Springfield, MA; burial in Springfield Cemetery, Springfield, MA