Tourists rediscover Civil War hero Chamberlain’s house

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BRUNSWICK – Pelle Rosenquist led tours of the Joshua Chamberlain house all summer long and all summer long it has made him cry.

The tears came when he talked about how the Civil War general from Brunswick honored his Confederate enemies by ordering his troops to salute them at the surrender at Appomattox.

Rosenquist, tall, lean, white-haired, has had to stop reading out loud from the battlefield letter Chamberlain wrote to his wife because he choked up every time. (“My darling wife I am dying mortally wounded . . . To know and love you makes life and death beautiful …”)

It’s not just the thought of Chamberlain — who had been nearly forgotten after his death until recently — that moves Rosenquist. It’s the smitten tourists.

Their eyes get misty when they hear about what his life was like or read excerpts of his writings mounted on the walls.

“It’s sort of awe, tinged with emotion,” he said.

One man from Virginia explained his visit saying that he’d always felt he owed Chamberlain for his tribute to the southern soldiers. A trip to Brunswick was the man’s way of paying back the “debt.”

A 10-year-old boy brought his German grandfather and reverently translated the tour for him.

“We’ll have both young girls and young boys, who instead of the latest rock star as an idol, will actually have Joshua Chamberlain,” said Rosenquist, who is tour guide and tour coordinator for the house.

There is something about the man that really gets people. This summer — like no other since the house was opened in 1984 — visitors have come in droves from all over the country to see the place where Chamberlain spent the last 55 years of his life.

The teary-eyed tourists and their nearly 2,000 visits a month to the brown clapboard house on Maine Street have taken the Pejepscot Historical Society pleasantly by surprise.

Director Erik Jorgensen has pinpointed the moment everything changed: 7 a.m. Sept. 23, 1993. A phone call from a curious reporter woke him up. The reporter asked about a leaked press release announcing that the movie “Gettysburg” would premiere in Brunswick.

From then on, the phone rang almost without stop.

“That was the day our lives changed irrevocably and forever,” he said.

Chamberlain’s popularity began a slow, gradual ascent in 1974 with Michael Shaara’s Pulitzer-Prize-winning book “The Killer Angels,” which described the Civil War battles through the eyes of the soldiers, including Chamberlain.

The book inspired a 1990 public television documentary by Ken Burns and the 1993 movie “Gettysburg” starring Jeff Daniels as Chamberlain.

After the movie, Chamberlain was, in Jorgensen’s words, “catapulted to the front page of a lot of people’s minds.”

The Chamberlain house attendance records chronicle the general’s modern rise to fame. In July of 1990, before the TV documentary, the historic house was open by appointment only and 46 people visited.

The following July, after the show aired, there were 323.

Now the house is open five days a week and this July 1, 616 people appeared at the front door, waited around in a small crowd on the lawn, signed in the guest book in the front hallway, walked through the five open rooms, listened solemnly to the tour guides and peered at the pictures on the wall.

The place is a mixture of elegant renovation, patchy decay, and its owner’s past.

In 1982 Chamberlain’s home, where the poet Longfellow once lived as a as a professor, was a rooming house so decayed by sloppy fix-up jobs and partying undergraduates that it was scheduled for demolition.

The historical society bought the house for $75,000 after a fund-raising campaign and has planned an official restoration survey for this year.

Inside the front hallway, Chamberlain’s dinner bell, donated by his granddaughter, hangs from a curving stairway and the walls have been repainted to their original dark red.

The library has been redone to match a scrap of gilded maroon wallpaper found behind a bookcase, which was sent to Paris and reproduced. In another room, behind his desk rests the ornate chair he sat in as governor. It was salvaged from the University of Maine where it served as a throne for homecoming queens.

In the back of the house, a closed-off room waits to be redone as a gift shop. Bright yellow walls blaze against lime-green moulding in a room that was once a dining room. Wall tiles in a drop ceiling peel off and a patch of a painted border, edged in gold, peeks through.

Out-of-town visitors are often dismayed by what time and neglect have done to Chamberlain’s house. A man from Ireland told Rosenquist that his country would never let the home of such a great national hero look like that. Still, people come to reverently videotape and take pictures of what they see.

They also take home lots of souvenirs.

The society has become a kind of Chamberlain-L.L. Bean of sorts, said Jorgensen. A makeshift catalogue — five photocopied pages stapled together — offers statues, lithographs and postcards, from 50 cents to $3,500.

Chamberlain-related books seem to walk out of the gift shop. The historical society can’t keep enough volumes or 8-by-10 glossy Chamberlain photos in stock. On average, a case of new books arrives each day.

One of the most popular books is “The Twentieth Maine” written in 1957 by John J. Pullen, who retired to Brunswick several years ago.

“I find myself working almost exclusively as a darkroom technician and a shipping clerk,” Jorgensen said. He will be able to return to writing the newsletter, fund raising, and the business of managing the historical society at summer’s end, when a staff person comes on to take care of Chamberlain requests.

“It’s been a crazy, wild ride,” Jorgensen said. When he talks about the devotion and curiosity people have for the Brunswick hero, he leans back in his chair and grins.

Chamberlain, a 34-year-old Bowdoin College rhetoric professor, took a sabbatical in 1862. Instead of studying abroad as teachers usually did, he joined the Army. Historians give him credit for preventing a Yankee defeat at Gettysburg and for winning the first decisive Union battle at Little Round Top.

He went on to fight in 22 other battles and skirmishes, and was wounded about six times. When a bullet shot through his hip, crushing his pelvis, nicking his bladder in 1864, doctors told him he would die. The next day he wrote a farewell letter to his wife. He later said he read his own obituary in the New York City newspapers. He lived until he was 85.

Chamberlain was selected by General Grant to accept the formal Confederate surrender that ended the four years of bloodshed. He was elected four times as governor of Maine and went on to become Bowdoin College president. Thirty years after the war, he was given the nation’s the highest award for valor — the Congressional Medal of Honor.

Staff at the historical society and Bowdoin college — where the Medal of Honor and original pencil-scrawled “deathbed” letter is kept — have watched the summers’ visitors with a mixture of empathy, amazement and amusement.

A story of Chamberlain comforting the wounded after a bloody battle is an example of the sort of thing Rosenquist thinks people adore. As Chamberlain walked across the field he recognized a dead soldier and leaned over him, overcome with grief.

“General you have the soul of a lion and the heart of a woman,” said an injured soldier who had been looking on.