PORTLAND, Maine — Tom Huntington grew up in Augusta, graduated from Cony High School, and now lives in Pennsylvania not far from Gettysburg, an ideal location for a student of the Civil War. Clearly, he was in the right place to write his latest book, “Maine Roads to Gettysburg: How Joshua Chamberlain, Oliver Howard, and 4,000 Men from the Pine Tree State Helped Win the Civil War’s Bloodiest Battle.”
Much of the book focuses on how Chamberlain led the 20th Maine regiment in its stand at Little Round Top, a pivotal moment in the three-day battle that turned the tide of the war. Oddly enough, Huntington and Chamberlain share a bond. They both attended Bowdoin College in Brunswick and were even members of the same fraternity, albeit it well over a century apart.
It’s interesting how, as we grow older, more Maine connections keep coming into our lives, reinforcing the belief I’ve long held that Maine is one big small town. Such is the case for Hungtington. In writing this book he visited the library at his alma matter many times to dig through its archives. “A long, long time ago, when I was a student at Bowdoin,” he writes, “I used to work at the library. Back then, I never dreamed I would be returning to Bowdoin to do research for a book about the Civil War….”
William Faulkner, who spent a lifetime in Mississippi wrestling with the ghosts of the Civil War, put it wisely. “The past is never dead,” he wrote. “It’s not even past.”