Samuel Sprague, Jr.

In 1860 he was a 24 year old shoemaker in Melrose, MA. He enlisted as a Private in Company A, 12th Massachusetts Infantry on 28 April 1861 at Fort Warren in Boston. He was promoted to Corporal on 23 August 1862.

He was wounded by a gunshot to his left ankle "shattering the bone" in action on 17 September 1862.

He was admitted to US Army General Hospital #6 at 72 Market Street in Frederick, MD on 28 September, by then also suffering from gangrene. He was sent to GH #1 in Frederick on 9 February 1863, then transferred, by his request of 6 February, to a hospital in Massachusetts on 18 May. He was discharged for disability in Boston on 24 June 1863.

By 1880 he was working in a shoe store in Melrose, but his wounded leg still gave him pain, so he had it amputated in 1881. In 1900 he had retired in Melrose and lived with his son and family, but was back in his own place there by 1910.

His service information from the Commonwealth of Massachusetts1 and his Compiled Service Records,2 online from fold3. Wound and hospital details from the Patient List 2 and Elbridge H. Goss's The Annals of Melrose, County of Middlesex, Massachusetts in the Great Rebellion, 1861-65 (1868). Personal details from family genealogists, the US Census of 1860, 1880-1910, and his obit in the Boston Globe of 15 January 1917. His gravesite is on Findagrave.

He married Fanny Larrabee (1840-1915) in April 1857 and they had a son Charles Lannon Sprague (1858-after 1903), later a dentist in Melrose.

Thanks to Jim Buchanan for the nudge to look further into Sprague and for the Goss reference.

06/19/1835; Melrose, MA

01/14/1917; Melrose, MA; burial in Wyoming Cemetery, Melrose, MA