Bridgewater man traveled 1,600 miles across a collapsing Confederacy

by Elisha Lee, for The Curious Yankee

Dana Hill has been a favorite place since my return to Bridgewater in 2015. Rising some 2,400 feet above the Ottauquechee River, it was a focal point of Windsor County’s mid-19th Century gold fever, and I first came there looking for mines. Finding them left me wondering about the rest of the landscape – the cellar holes, stone walls, and ancient apple trees still clinging to life on wooded hillsides. Who were these people who built farms on steep, rock-strewn hillsides miles from town? They were necessarily a tough, resourceful breed.

The cellar hole of Nahum Baker’s farm sits about halfway up the south side of Dana Hill. The farm was old by the time he settled here in 1890. Still known as the Alfred Gillett farm, it was named for a previous owner who had given up trying to wrestle a living from its soil back in 1863.

At 48, Baker was getting on in years as well. Born in Sharon in 1843, he was the fourth son of a peripatetic day laborer who would have a total of ten children by two marriages. There were literally too many mouths to feed, and by 1850, the family was scattered by poverty. His two oldest brothers, William (17) and Alonzo (15), lived on their own and worked as laborers in Bridgewater and Hartford, respectively. His brother Henry (10) was living with a family in Sharon. The whereabouts of Nahum himself, then eight years old, is a mystery. By 1860, however, he had left Vermont for a farm in Wabasha County, Minnesota.

For a family struggling to survive, the Civil War presented as much of an opportunity as a threat. On May 21, 1861, 20-year-old Henry L. Baker enlisted as a private in Company E of the 2^nd Vermont Infantry. Company E was the Tunbridge Light Infantry, comprised mainly of men from Tunbridge, Royalton, and Sharon, where the oldest Baker boys had grown up. Seven days later, Nahum Baker enlisted as a private in Company I of the 1st Minnesota Infantry. Their brother Alonzo would wait until August 1863 to join Company A of the 4th Vermont Infantry, enlisting as a paid substitute for Levi Minor, a draftee from Woodstock.

Baker’s service with the 1st Minnesota was brief. The regiment was ordered to Washington, D. C., where he was discharged for disability on August 1, 1861. A month later, he joined his brother Henry in Company E of the 2nd Vermont, stationed on the Potomac River.

The Baker brothers followed the bloody course of the war, surviving Antietam, Fredericksburg, and Gettysburg, where their regiment famously held the Union line against Pickett’s Charge. On May 5, 1864, Henry was wounded at the Battle of the Wilderness, necessitating the amputation of his left arm and ending his military service. On June 1, less than five weeks later, Nahum was taken prisoner at the Battle of Cold Harbor on the outskirts of Richmond.

With his capture, Nahum Baker’s extraordinary odyssey began. He was initially transported to Libby Prison in Richmond, some ten miles southwest of the battlefield. Libby was a three-story tobacco warehouse with open iron-barred windows and no heat. The headquarters of the Confederate military prison system, Libby was used primarily to hold captured officers, with enlisted prisoners kept there temporarily before being sent to other prison facilities. Severely overcrowded, life at Libby was a daily struggle with darkness, extreme temperatures, vermin, and disease.

After two weeks, Baker was shipped some 650 miles south to Andersonville, Georgia, where he would be held until September 1864. Formally known as Camp Sumter, Andersonville was little more than a 26-acre tract of land enclosed by a stockade fence. When Baker arrived in June of 1864, the prison held 23,944 men, captives of a government unwilling to release them yet lacking the resources to house, clothe, or feed them. Conditions at Andersonville were as bad as those at Libby Prison, and discipline was infamously brutal. Captain Henry Wirz, Camp Sumter’s commandant, would later be the only Confederate official executed by the Federal government for war crimes.

Baker would remain at Andersonville for about ten weeks before being moved again, this time 200 miles east to Savannah and then 85 miles north to Camp Lawton in Millen, Georgia. Modeled after Andersonville but with a planned capacity of 40,000 men, Camp Lawton was situated just south of Augusta, out of the path of Sherman’s March to the Sea. Said to be the largest prison in the world, it was built too late to be of much use. With the Confederacy rapidly coming apart, it would only operate for a few months.

A contemporary newspaper article published in The Vermont Record and Farmer of 18 March 1865 relates:

While at Millen [Baker] saved a part of his daily rations of meat and sold it to a fellow prisoner each day for ten cents. In this way he finally accumulated ten dollars. With this money he effected an exchange of his tattered Federal uniform for a Confederate one of decent gray, which aided him in his final escape.¹

Baker escaped from Camp Lawton on or about December 10, 1864, which was about the time that it was evacuated by the Confederacy and its prisoners transported to other locations.

The details of Baker’s escape aren’t recorded, but he probably took advantage of chaotic conditions to make a run for the woods. His account tells us that he was pursued by Bloodhounds, managing to kill several and elude the rest. Moving almost certainly on foot and in a Confederate uniform, he made his way 120 miles west to Macon, where he forged a military pass admitting him to a hospital. Confederate military passes weren’t complicated documents, and, given his situation, it is likely that he somehow obtained one and filled it out as a private in the 38^th Tennessee Infantry needing medical care. After spending six months on a tour of the three most infamous prison camps in the south, his condition probably required no deception.

Baker then made his way to a military hospital in Augusta, some 125 miles northeast of Macon and ironically close to Millen. It’s not clear which hospital he was in, but he was able to remain there for a month, presumably regaining his strength. Augusta was overflowing with wounded men from both the Eastern and Western theatres of the war, and medical authorities were probably too preoccupied to question his identity.

Eventually, Baker’s Confederate alter ego was judged fit for duty and ordered to report to his purported regiment, then some 450 miles west in Tupelo, Mississippi. Once again on a train and moving in a direction that was undesirable in multiple respects, Baker climbed off at a place he identified as Varon Station and made his way on foot to Holly Springs, Mississippi. There, he was apprehended by a band of Confederates, not as an escaping prisoner of war but as a deserter. Taken to their camp, he took advantage of a dark and stormy night to escape yet again and, on February 25, 1865, reached the Union lines near Memphis, Tennessee. There, he provided military authorities with a written account of a journey encompassing some 1,600 miles and incarceration at three of the Confederacy’s most infamous prison camps.

In March of 1865, Baker was sent to Brattleboro, where he was mustered out of the army. A month later, he married Sarah Davis of Woodstock, and the couple returned to Minnesota, where they sold his 160-acre farm. Later, they moved to Penryn, California, ultimately settling in Bridgewater by 1873. In 1890, he purchased the Alfred Gillett farm on Dana Hill, where he and Sarah lived for the remainder of their lives. The “Gold Fever” hadn’t completely petered out, and in 1898, the wily old veteran sold his farm’s mineral rights to the Oriental Gold Mining Company for $1.00 in cash and $1,000 of company stock.

Neither the mineral rights nor the company proved of any value. Nahum Baker died at age 67 on December 11, 1909, and is buried with his wife in Woodstock’s Riverside Cemetery. His farm on Dana Hill passed to his daughter Alyuna Eunice Baker, who married into the Carbino family. The so-called Carbino Mine (built by the Oriental Gold Mining Company) can still be found just north of the old farm foundations.

1. The Vermont Record and Farmer, 18 March 1865 ↩︎