Beyond family stories...

 In his old age Joseph W. Crowther, my great-great-grandfather, went to Bethany, CT, to live with the family of his youngest son, Albert: wife Carrie and children Alton, Mildred and Gladys (my grandmother).  Gladys always spoke fondly of her grandfather, and especially treasured the stories he had told her of his Civil War days.  A mixture of his old age when he told the stories, her old age when she passed them on to us, and the distance of the original events garbled many of the details.  She insisted that he had fought at Gettysburg, and had shaken the hand of Abraham Lincoln.  She said that one day he sat on the floor with her and on a large sheet of butcher block paper drew a map of Gettysburg, and described his part in the battle.  She said the Confederates had occupied a hill, which his unit charged up.  I had heard the stories many times, but in 1985 I was living in Gettysburg, and sometime after that I insisted to her that the Union forces never charged a hill occupied by Confederates at Gettysburg.  I also told her we had received his military records, which showed that in July 1863 he was in Louisiana.  But she couldn't let go of the memories she had carried all those years.

When I read the history of the unit he joined with his twin brother, Benjamin, the 128th NY Infantry, I began to wonder if perhaps there might not be bits of truth in those stories after all.  I discovered that he was indeed in Gettysburg, but it was not in July of 1863 but 13 October 1862, when the 128th was dispatched from Camp Millington (outside of Baltimore) to Gettysburg to protect the town from a raid by J. E. B. Stuart.  By the time they got there, however, Stuart was back in Virginia. 

And there was a battle in which his unit charged up a hill to attack Confederate troops--Fisher's Hill, VA, on 22 September 1864.  "Down the side of a ravine and then up Fisher's Hill the blue lines swept.  The 128th and the 176th were in the lead all the way and were the first to reach the heights...The 2nd Brigade Commander, Col. McCauley, reported that, 'the charge of the 128th was gallantly done'" [Bud Miller, Full Measure of Devotion, 24].

One day I was looking for information about the 128th on the internet and came across the webpage of  Dean Thomas. I e-mailed, and was surprised and excited when he told me he had a photocopy of Joseph Crowther's diary (from November 1864-July 1865), which he had found in the Virginia Military Institute Archives.  He was kind enough to send me a photocopy, and I have transcribed it for this page. 

Other pages in this section detail his descendants and provide records that were in his Bible, as well as further information on the 128th NY.