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Williams, Henry P., a soldier, at 14

a tintype in possession of Jeanette Morley Buck.
2017- Jeannette sent me an original.

Henry P. Williams, Civil War soldier

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FaceBook, Words of Gold
Favorites · July 28, 2017 ·

Henry Williams-
There was nothing much I liked better when I was a kid than to follow my Gram Williams into the attic room that opened from the spare bedroom upstairs in our house. The so-called attic was unfinished with rough boards on the walls and ceiling. Best of all, it was crammed with stuff. There was a window that looked out over our driveway and another smaller one over the roof of the front porch. One would have to climb over a goodly amount of “stuff” to get close enough to wash either of them. It didn’t happen often. Trunks and boxes and bags were piled on and around each other. Some were fairly recent deposits. Others had been there for years. One day Gram lifted a few bags from the top of an old trunk and opened its curved lid. She proceeded to show me an outdated black dress and a few other items of clothing, telling me that those were the clothes in which she expected to be buried. I think my expression showed that I was nowhere near ready to talk about such as that.
Just to the left of the door when we went in was a picture that always fascinated me. Looking out from an old-fashioned deep ornate frame was a young man wearing what I was told was a Civil War uniform. He was severely solemn, his arms cradling a long gun against his shoulder.
“That’s Henry Williams,” Gram would say, “Edsil’s brother. He was killed at the Battle of the Wilderness.” Edsil was her late husband; my great-grandfather. I had no idea back then what the Battle of the Wilderness was. I’m not sure what she knew. I don’t recall that she ever tried to explain it.
As time went by, however, I asked more questions. Henry was wounded in the battle, I learned, and later died in a military hospital. I’m not at all sure how much any of the family knew. But every time I went into that room with her, or when I got up the nerve to take a peek on my own, I couldn’t take my eyes from that young boy with the gun. Years later, when the “attic“ was remodeled into a useable room, I claimed the picture as my own. I removed the tintype from the frame and placed it among my Williams information. The family records told a sad tale. Henry was 17 years old when he died. Just a boy. Just a kid trying to be a man.
Years went by. I learned more about the terrible conflict we call the Civil War. I learned about the tremendous death toll; the horrendous conditions of military hospitals of the time and the awful cost to the families waiting at home.
At some point, friends at the Potter County Historical Society provided me with information that Henry was buried in Arlington National Cemetery. I deeply regretted that I was not aware of that at the time I visited there.
Once again, I gazed at that old tintype. Henry P. Williams was born January, 28, 1847, probably in Jasper, New York, the oldest child of Joseph Thomas and Susan Mariah MacMasters Williams. At some point, the Williams family, which eventually included eight children, moved to the Harrison Valley area, where their youngest son, my great-grandfather Charles Edsil Williams was born in 1860.
Gram said that for various reasons, Henry wasn’t at all happy at home. He volunteered one month and a day after his seventeenth birthday and became a private in Co. G, 53rd Regiment of Pennsylvania under Captain Arch F. Jones. He was enrolled, according to the official discharge papers, on the 29th day of February, 1864, to serve three years or “during the war.”
He was discharged from the service of the United States on the 17th day of June, 1864 at Washington, D. C. , not quite four months later, “by reason of death.” Edsil, Henry’s little brother, was just short of his fourth birthday.
The Battle of the Wilderness took place May 5 - 7th, of 1864; coming to a halt after General Grant decided that there were better battles to fight. The starkness of the dates makes it clear that Henry Williams, the seventeen year old kid from Potter County, Pennsylvania, lived and suffered from his wounds for more than a month before his death. As much as they yearned to do so, his family could not go to his side to comfort him. And he was just one among the more than 600,000 men who died during the Civil War.
John Wetzel, another Williams descendant, recently shared with me the on-line photos of Henry’s grave stone in Arlington National Cemetery. It is clearly marked with his name and the date of his death.
I wish I could have told my Gram Williams about that. See Less

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