On a Sunday afternoon in October, a small crowd will gather at the Rural Cemetery on Washington Road in Waldoboro, where a granite marker bears the name of a man who outlived his war by nearly eighty years. The Waldoborough Historical Society and the Corporal George Samuel Cobb Camp #68 of the Sons of Union Veterans of the Civil War will hold a commemorative service for John W. Palmer at 2 p.m. on Sunday, Oct. 11. Any descendants of Palmer are welcome to join.
The service honors a soldier who served with the 32nd Maine Infantry and died in 1944, making him the last Civil War veteran to be buried in Lincoln County. That single fact carries a quiet weight. When Palmer was laid to rest, the war he had fought in was already passing out of living memory, and the men who had worn the blue were down to a handful across the state.
The 32nd Maine Infantry was a late-war regiment, organized at Augusta between March 3 and May 6, 1864, as a volunteer unit. Six of its companies left Maine for Washington, D.C., on April 20, 1864, and the remaining four followed on May 11, rejoining the rest at the North Anna River in Virginia on May 26. The regiment was attached to the 2nd Brigade, 2nd Division of the IX Corps in the Army of the Potomac, and it was thrown almost immediately into some of the hardest fighting of the conflict.
Its record reads like a roll call of the Overland Campaign and the siege that followed. The 32nd Maine fought at the Battle of the Wilderness from May 5 to 7, 1864, then at Spotsylvania Court House from May 8 to 21. It was engaged along the North Anna and the Pamunkey, at Totopotomoy, and at Cold Harbor and Bethesda Church in early June. From June 16 it entered the Siege of Petersburg, taking part in the First Assault on Petersburg and, on July 30, 1864, the Battle of the Crater. Later came Weldon Railroad, Poplar Springs Church, and the Boydton Plank Road at Hatcher's Run. On December 12, 1864, fifteen officers and 470 enlisted men of the 32nd Maine were consolidated into the 31st Maine Infantry.
The cost was severe. According to the regimental history compiled by Civil War in the East, the 32nd Maine lost 202 men during the war: four officers and 81 enlisted men killed or mortally wounded, and three officers and 114 enlisted men dead of disease. Colonel Mark F. Wentworth, who organized the regiment, resigned on October 18, 1864, because of his wound. Palmer was one of the men who came home.
The ceremony is being organized in part by the Corporal George Samuel Cobb Camp #68, a Maine camp of the Sons of Union Veterans of the Civil War. The camp is based in Camden and meets at American Legion Post #30 on Pearl Street on the third Friday of each month at 7 p.m. Its commander is Thornton Batty Jr., and its secretary is Steven Gibbons. The camp takes its name from a corporal, and its members have spent recent years doing the patient, unglamorous work of finding and recording the graves of Civil War veterans across the region.
That work has produced real discoveries. In one case reported by the Maine at War blog, written by Civil War historian Brian Swartz, Gibbons searched a rural cemetery in Newburgh, in Penobscot County, and found a headstone shattered into seven pieces beside the flattened marker of a man named Thomas Flinn. A small American flag in a five-star GAR flagholder marked the spot as a veteran's grave, but nothing identified the man beneath it. He turned out to be Juan F. Flinn, a 1st Maine Cavalry trooper mortally wounded at Sailor's Creek, Virginia, on April 6, 1865, who died in a Washington hospital that June. Gibbons began the process of obtaining a veteran's headstone, only to discover within hours that Flinn was not buried in Newburgh at all. He rests at Arlington National Cemetery, in Section 13, Site 11483. The broken stones in Newburgh mark a cenotaph.
That story says something about why a service like the one planned for Palmer matters. The men who fought the Civil War are now remembered mostly through fragments: a flagholder, a worn inscription, a name on a list. The Sons of Union Veterans have made it their project to keep those fragments from disappearing, and to give the men behind them their due.
The Waldoborough Historical Society, which is co-hosting the October service, keeps its museum at 1164 Main Street in Waldoboro. The society's collections document a town with a long memory of its own. Waldoboro was settled in the eighteenth century by German immigrants brought over by General Samuel Waldo, and the Old German Meeting House, built in 1772 on Bremen Road, still stands with its adjacent burial ground. The town's history is bound up with the sea, the Medomak River, and the generations of families who stayed.
Palmer belonged to one of those generations. He served in a regiment that existed for barely nine months and was folded into another before the war ended, and he lived on until 1944, long enough to become the last of Lincoln County's Civil War veterans. The service at the Rural Cemetery is free and open to the public, and it is meant especially for anyone who can trace a line back to him. Descendants are invited to come and stand at the grave.
For those who do, the afternoon will be a chance to put a name and a face to a story that might otherwise survive only as a line in a county history. The war ended in 1865. The last man who carried it home to Lincoln County died in 1944. On Oct. 11, the town will remember him again.