Stone dove on grave a Maine mystery in Georgia

If you ask the Internet search engine Google to find Web sites containing the words Andersonville Prison and Maine, you get hundreds of hits. That’s a sure sign that even today there’s an inextricable link between the notorious Confederate POW camp and the Pine Tree State.

I scrolled through the first 50 or so and came up with the story of Lewis Tuttle of Saco. Along with more than 250 other Mainers who died at the Georgia prison, including his brother David, the sergeant is buried in the nearby Andersonville National Cemetery.

Lewis’ grave is the subject of a mystery. A century ago, about the same time a towering Maine monument was dedicated at Andersonville on Nov. 14, 1904, a stone dove was noticed atop the sergeant’s headstone. It’s especially remarkable considering the graveyard consists of rows upon rows of identical plain marble headstones marking the graves of nearly 13,000 Yankee soldiers who died at the prison.

I suspect the mystery is easily solved. A few weeks before the dedication of the monument, a crew of men from C. E. Tayntor & Co., the Hallowell firm that designed the memorial, arrived at Andersonville to erect it after it was shipped from Maine. Would it not be plausible that a member of that group of stone masons, perhaps a family friend or relative acting on his own or at the behest of a loved one, brought the rough-hewn dove from Maine and attached it to the stone? Tuttle reportedly was married and had two daughters at the time of his death.

Back then, Americans regarded the graying Civil War veterans akin to gods, much as they regard the remaining World War II veterans today. A dove for Sgt. Tuttle would have been seen as just as appropriate as the publicly funded 37-foot-high Maine monument made of granite mined in Hallowell and Round Pond. A hulking soldier, 8 feet, 9 inches tall, with head bowed, facing north, crowned the top.

A delegation of dignitaries, including four members of the governor’s Executive Council, attended the dedication ceremony. The speeches fill a small book that can still be seen at some libraries. Afterwards, this group of Yankees traveled to Atlanta and then on to St. Louis, where the Louisiana Purchase Exposition was still in progress. That’s where they met Gov. John Hill, who had been unable to attend the Andersonville dedication.

Andersonville Prison was a hellhole where a full 29 percent of its 45,000 inhabitants died from a lack of food and water and medical treatment.

Ten days after the ceremony in 1904, the Bangor Daily News ran a brief story about one of the lucky survivors. Thomas Davis was by then a sergeant in the Bangor Police Department and one of the force’s founding members. When he died in 1926, he received high praise from those who remembered his police days, especially for his “efficiency, courage and excellent judgment.” Those same traits also placed him in good standing at Andersonville.

Davis, who was a private in the First Maine Cavalry, was captured with a large group of his comrades at the Battle of Ground Squirrel Bridge at South Anna River about 20 miles from Richmond, Va., about three weeks before Sgt. Tuttle and his brother were captured at Spotsylvania. During the six months he suffered at Andersonville, Davis became the record keeper for his fellow soldiers, making sure their bodies were identified when they died and their graves were marked when they were buried.

“The name, company and regiment was marked on a piece of bark for,” says Davis, “there was no paper there, and pinned to the man and then if it were possible, the grave was marked by a board upon which the name was written,” according to the newspaper report.

This must have been hard work for Davis. Sometimes hundreds of men died in a day. The starving prisoners, as many as 33,000 confined at one time, most ill with diarrhea or some other condition, were segregated in a huge stockade. Where Davis found bark is something of a mystery.

“‘I tell you,’ says Davis in speaking of his experience, ‘they talk of the other rebel prisons, but I don’t believe that anything could equal Andersonville. Shelter we had none. It was lie out in the rain or heat, whichever the weather happened to be. The food was of the meanest sort and the medical treatment was practically nothing. The water that we were forced to drink was from the little brook, which ran through the pen and into which the drainage of the prison went. Is it not strange that any of us came out alive.”

Today, Thomas Davis and Lewis Tuttle are minor footnotes to history, but their experiences epitomize the horror of war. Perhaps Davis knew Tuttle. Maine men doubtlessly stuck together. Over the 14-month history of the prison there were some 580 Maine men incarcerated there.

If Davis’ efficient record-keeping skills had a wider scope beyond his own regiment, he may have played a role in making sure that Tuttle’s grave could be identified and moved after the war had ended. Hundreds of soldiers – and their families – were not so lucky.

How would the tough Bangor cop have regarded the sergeant’s dove? Would he have regarded it as a violation of government regulations and military protocol disturbing the numbing sameness of this mortuary garden, or as a symbol of the place in the hearts of thousands of Americans that Tuttle and each of the dead still occupied 39 years after the end of the war? I like to think the latter.

Wayne E. Reilly has edited two books of Civil War era diaries and letters including “The Diaries of Sarah Jane and Emma Ann Foster: A Year in Maine During the Civil War.” He can be reached at wreilly@bangordailynews.net.