To the editor:
I want to thank all the Hodgdon area men and women who worked so very much to ready the Hodgdon cemetery for Jewett Williams’ arrival home.
Thank you to those who delivered him home to his two sets of grandparents, to his parents, Rosaline Jackins and Jared Williams. Thank you to the wonderful military groups who gave all of us a ceremony we will never forget, and thank you to those who provided an after-service refreshment.
Jewett Williams was the very last CIvil War veteran to be finally interred. He is home where he wished to be and deserved to be, honored by all.
A soldier’s life
I read Linda Williams’ letter in the Pioneer Times, printed just four days before the military event.
None of us knew of the 1870 events in Jewett Williams’ life leading up to a divorce because of his behavior. There is no excuse for it except as we see in today’s men returning home from terrible wars. And the Civil War was a terrible war for those like Jewett Williams, who was in the thick of Confederate bullets and cannonballs and the use of bayonets all the time.
He fought in the Civil War battles of Petersburg, Peebles’ Farm, White Oak Road, Quaker Road, Five Forks, Appomattox, etc. It doesn’t excuse his homelife behavior, but all his three-and-a-half-year battle strife could have well caused his postwar family behavior, as it still is in today’s returning soldiers.
In 1919, Jewett Williams was one of several veterans of the Civil War who visited and spoke to students of several schools, telling of the horrors of that terrible war, the Civil War.
