Elbridge P. Pratt, E. P. Pratt Post No. 90, and the G.A.R. Hall at 160 Main Street, Fairfield, Maine

In Fairfield, Maine, the history of one Main Street building is inseparable from the memory of a young man who never returned from the Civil War. Elbridge P. Pratt, a Fairfield man born in 1841, enlisted in Fairfield in July 1862 and entered the Nineteenth Maine Volunteer Infantry as a private. Less than a year later, on July 2, 1863, he was killed at Gettysburg. Twenty years afterward, Fairfield veterans organized a Grand Army of the Republic post bearing his name. By the beginning of the twentieth century, that post occupied the second floor of the brick commercial building at 160 Main Street. The building consequently became more than a meeting room. It became a local place of remembrance, fellowship, veterans' activity, and the transmission of Civil War memory from one generation to the next.¹

Elbridge P. Pratt of Fairfield

The surviving Fairfield record places Pratt among the town's Civil War soldiers and, more significantly, among those Fairfield residents who died either in military service or from wounds or sickness contracted during the war. The Fairfield Register of 1904 lists E. P. Pratt among Fairfield men who served in the Union armies and then places Elbridge P. Pratt among the town's war dead.² The record is terse, but its position within the town's memorial record is significant. Pratt was not merely a man who had once lived in Fairfield and subsequently died far away; he was remembered as one of Fairfield's own fallen soldiers.

Local historical records preserved by the Fairfield Historical Society provide additional biographical information. Pratt was born in 1841, the son of Jesse Pratt, a farmer, and Hannah Hubbard Pratt. On July 23, 1862, he enlisted at Fairfield. He was mustered into the Nineteenth Maine Infantry as a private and entered the regiment during the period when the Union army was preparing for the campaigns that would carry it into Virginia and, in 1863, Pennsylvania.³

The Nineteenth Maine became part of the Army of the Potomac and participated in the campaigns of Fredericksburg, Chancellorsville, and Gettysburg. For Pratt, however, the campaign ended at Gettysburg. The local Fairfield record states that he was killed on July 2, 1863, and that he was subsequently buried in Gettysburg National Cemetery.⁴

His death occurred during one of the most severe engagements experienced by the regiment. The Nineteenth Maine's own regimental history records Pratt as a member of Company C and identifies him among those killed during the Gettysburg fighting.⁵ His death therefore belongs to the regiment's larger story of July 2, when the Nineteenth Maine was thrown into the fighting and helped repel a powerful Confederate assault.

The Nineteenth Maine at Gettysburg

The most valuable account of the Nineteenth Maine's experience on July 2 comes from one of its own veterans, Sergeant Silas Adams of Company F. Adams later wrote an extended account of the regiment's actions at Gettysburg, drawing upon his own experience and the recollections of other veterans.⁶ Adams and Pratt served in different companies, but they belonged to the same regiment and fought together in the same battle line. Adams therefore provides a firsthand account of the battlefield experience shared by Pratt and his fellow soldiers, even though he does not identify Pratt specifically in his narrative.

Adams describes the Nineteenth Maine's position as the Confederate attack developed. The regiment was confronted by an advancing enemy and participated in the effort to halt the Confederate assault. The fighting was sufficiently severe that the regiment was forced temporarily to fall back when the enemy appeared on its right flank. The men nevertheless re-formed in good order. Then came Colonel Francis E. Heath's command to fix bayonets, followed by the order to charge. Adams remembered the regiment moving forward across the plain “like a tornado let loose.”⁷

The importance of the regiment's action is confirmed by the official reports of its superior commanders. Major General Winfield Scott Hancock, commanding the Second Corps, specifically stated that in the operation repulsing the Confederate attack in front of Gibbon's Division, “the Nineteenth Maine, Colonel F. E. Heath commanding, bore a conspicuous part.” Brigadier General William Harrow likewise reported that the enemy attacked Colonel Heath's regiment “with equal desperation.” The Confederates temporarily captured three guns of the battery on the regiment's left, but Heath's men retook the guns and carried them from the field. Harrow commended the officers and men of the regiment and the supporting artillerymen for their determination and valor.⁸

These official commendations give important context to Pratt's death. He was not merely a soldier who happened to die during the three-day battle. He was a member of a regiment that was singled out by its corps commander for its conspicuous role in repulsing the Confederate attack. Pratt's individual actions cannot be reconstructed from the surviving evidence, but his place within that action can.

The regimental account also gives us a glimpse of the cost. When the Nineteenth Maine returned from its charge near dusk, the men lay down close to the ground from which they had advanced. The fighting had ended for the moment, but the battlefield remained filled with wounded men. When the roll was called, many soldiers failed to answer. Adams remembered the surviving soldiers responding for their missing comrades with fragments of terrible battlefield testimony: one man had been killed before the regiment fired; another had fallen after the first volley; another had been shot through the head; another had been killed during the charge. Strong men, Adams recalled, sobbed as the names of the dead were called.⁹

Pratt's name is not included in the individual examples Adams gives in this passage, and the evidence does not establish precisely when or how he was killed. It is therefore inappropriate to claim that he necessarily fell during the final charge. What can be said is more historically sound: Pratt was killed during the July 2 fighting in which the Nineteenth Maine repulsed the Confederate attack, advanced across the field, re-formed under fire, and charged again.

“Such Is War”

Adams's account becomes even more revealing after the roll call. The regiment spent the night on the battlefield, with wounded men lying between the opposing lines. Adams heard a cry for water and went forward a short distance. There he found a wounded Confederate soldier, a boy of approximately seventeen who said he belonged to one of the Georgia regiments of Wright's Brigade. The young man had been shot through the lung and was bleeding internally. He told Adams that he was the only child of a widowed mother and that he had run away from home to enlist in the Confederate army. At the boy's request, Adams knelt beside him and attempted to pray with him. By dawn the young soldier was dead.¹⁰

Adams concluded the episode by reflecting upon the mothers throughout the country who waited for sons who would never return. His final words were simple: “Such is war.”¹¹

That passage is important in understanding the later G.A.R. movement in Fairfield. The Civil War remembered by these veterans was not simply a series of military victories and defeats. It was an accumulation of absent names, dead comrades, wounded men, broken families, and memories of young men encountered on battlefields far from Maine.

The surviving soldiers carried those experiences home.

From Pratt's Death to E. P. Pratt Post No. 90

On October 18, 1883, Fairfield veterans organized E. P. Pratt Post No. 90 of the Grand Army of the Republic. The post was named in honor of Elbridge P. Pratt.¹² The choice of his name connected the organization directly to Fairfield's own Civil War dead.

The G.A.R. was much more than a ceremonial veterans' association. Its fundamental purposes included fraternity, charity, and loyalty. Local posts provided veterans with regular opportunities to meet with men who shared the defining experience of their generation. Meetings and camp-fires could involve stories of wartime experiences, songs, fellowship, and remembrance. G.A.R. organizations also assisted veterans, widows, and orphans in need and played a major role in the creation and perpetuation of Memorial Day observances.¹³

The significance of those purposes is especially clear when considered against Adams's description of Gettysburg. Men who had once lain together on the battlefield and listened to the roll being called could later meet as veterans in a local post. The post gave them a structured community in which the bonds formed during the war could continue after the armies had disappeared.

In Fairfield, those bonds acquired a local identity through Pratt's name.

The post was already an established organization by 1891, when a Maine directory listed “Post Elbridge P. Pratt, No. 90” among Fairfield organizations and recorded its regular meetings on the first and third Wednesdays.¹⁴ The schedule demonstrates that the post was part of the town's recurring civic and social life. It was not simply an organization that appeared once each year for Memorial Day. Its members gathered regularly.

The G.A.R. Hall at 160 Main Street

The building at 160 Main Street provides the physical setting for this later chapter of Pratt's story.

The Sanborn fire-insurance maps show that the building was a brick structure and that its first-floor commercial use remained remarkably consistent. In October 1884, the first floor housed a stove and hardware store while the second floor was occupied by a paint shop.¹⁵ By December 1889, the stove and hardware store remained on the first floor while the second floor was identified as an office.¹⁶ The November 1895 map again shows the stove and hardware store below and an office above.¹⁷

The transformation occurred between 1895 and 1901. The November 1901 Sanborn map identifies the first floor as a stove and hardware store and the second floor as “G.A.R. Hall.”¹⁸ By July 1911, the same arrangement remained: the first floor continued as a stove and hardware store, while the second floor was identified as “G.A.R. Hall.” The 1911 index also identifies the G.A.R. Hall among the town's special locations.¹⁹

This arrangement is historically revealing. The G.A.R. did not require a monumental building in order to become an important institution. At 160 Main Street, the veterans occupied the second floor of an ordinary brick commercial building. Below them, a business sold stoves and hardware. Above that everyday commercial activity, Fairfield's Civil War veterans maintained a space devoted to fellowship, memory, organization, and service.

The contrast is meaningful. The hall was not separated from ordinary community life; it was embedded within it.

The building also illustrates an important chronology. E. P. Pratt Post No. 90 existed before the Sanborn maps identify the second floor of 160 Main Street as G.A.R. Hall. The hall therefore should not be regarded as the origin of the post. Rather, it was a later physical home for an organization that had already existed for many years. The post's documented 1891 meeting schedule precedes the first Sanborn identification of the second floor as a G.A.R. hall.²⁰

A Community of Veterans and Families

The G.A.R. hall also served a broader community than the male veterans alone.

The Woman's Relief Corps, an auxiliary associated with the G.A.R., provided another avenue for veterans' families and women to participate in veterans' charitable and commemorative activities. The Fairfield evidence shows that the E. P. Pratt Relief Corps was still active in 1918. The Fairfield Journal reported that the officers of the corps would hold their installation at the G.A.R. Hall on January 16, 1918, with Post members and their wives, Corps members' husbands, and members of the Sons of Veterans and their wives invited.²¹

That notice gives the hall a much broader social meaning.

By 1918, the room above 160 Main Street could bring together Civil War veterans, their wives, members of the veterans' auxiliary, the husbands of auxiliary members, and the next generation represented by the Sons of Veterans. The hall thus functioned as an intergenerational community space centered upon the memory of the Civil War.

Pratt's name remained at the center of that community.

The Meaning of Pratt's Name

There is a profound irony in the relationship between Pratt's death and the organization that later bore his name.

On the night of July 2, 1863, the surviving men of the Nineteenth Maine called the roll and discovered that many of their comrades could no longer answer. Pratt was among the Fairfield men who would never return from the war. The battlefield had taken his physical presence from the community.

The G.A.R. post reversed that absence in a symbolic way.

When Fairfield veterans organized E. P. Pratt Post No. 90, Pratt's name became part of the continuing life of the men who had survived. His name appeared on the post's records, in its identity, and eventually in the name of its meeting hall. The dead soldier could no longer attend a Wednesday meeting, tell a story of the war, vote on post business, or participate in a Memorial Day ceremony. But the organization that carried his name could continue to speak for him.

The meaning of the hall becomes clearer when the battlefield accounts are placed beside it. Adams remembered the terrible roll call at Gettysburg. Hancock and Harrow officially recognized the regiment's courage. The dead of the Nineteenth Maine remained part of the regiment's memory. Fairfield's veterans then created a post bearing the name of one of their own.

The result was a chain of remembrance stretching across decades:

Pratt the soldier; Pratt the fallen Fairfield man; E. P. Pratt Post No. 90; and finally the G.A.R. Hall at 160 Main Street.

The physical building was therefore the culmination of a process that began on a battlefield.

Conclusion

The history of 160 Main Street cannot be fully understood simply by describing its architecture or commercial occupants. The Sanborn maps show a brick building whose first floor served Fairfield's everyday commercial needs while its second floor eventually became a veterans' hall. But behind the words “G.A.R. Hall” lies a much deeper history.

That history begins with Elbridge P. Pratt.

Pratt was a Fairfield man who enlisted in 1862 and became a private in Company C of the Nineteenth Maine Infantry. On July 2, 1863, he fought with his regiment at Gettysburg. His regiment was attacked with great force, helped protect and recover artillery, and was later commended by General Hancock for its conspicuous role in repulsing the Confederate advance. Sergeant Silas Adams, a member of another company of the same regiment who fought alongside Pratt, later recalled the charge, the return at dusk, and the terrible roll call when the names of fallen comrades were answered by the living.²²

Pratt did not return to Fairfield.

His name did.

In 1883, Fairfield veterans organized E. P. Pratt Post No. 90. By 1891, the post was meeting regularly. Between 1895 and 1901, the second floor of 160 Main Street changed from an office into a G.A.R. Hall. By 1911, the hall remained in use, and in 1918 it hosted the installation of officers of the E. P. Pratt Relief Corps, bringing veterans and their families together under the name of a man who had been dead for fifty-five years.

The hall therefore represented more than nostalgia for a vanished war. It was a living institution through which Fairfield's Civil War generation maintained fellowship, assisted one another, remembered its dead, and transmitted its experiences to those who followed.

At Gettysburg, Pratt had been one of the names that failed to answer the roll.

At Fairfield, his name became the name of the post.

And above a Main Street hardware store, in a brick building at 160 Main Street, that name continued to answer.

Footnotes

1. Mary Grow, “Up and Down the Kennebec Valley: Memorial Day—Part 3,” The Town Line, May 24, 2023; Harry Edward Mitchell et al., comps., The Fairfield Register, 1904 (Kent's Hill, ME: H. E. Mitchell Publishing Company, 1904), 25–29.

2. Mitchell et al., The Fairfield Register, 1904, 25–29.

3. Fairfield Historical Society, “Military Information,” Civil War soldiers records; Grow, “Up and Down the Kennebec Valley: Memorial Day—Part 3.”

4. Grow, “Up and Down the Kennebec Valley: Memorial Day—Part 3.”

5. John Day Smith, The History of the Nineteenth Regiment of Maine Volunteer Infantry, 1862–1865 (Minneapolis: Great Western Printing Company, 1909), regimental roster and Gettysburg sections.

6. Silas Adams, “The Nineteenth Maine at Gettysburg,” in War Papers Read Before the Commandery of the State of Maine, Military Order of the Loyal Legion of the United States, vol. 4 (Portland, ME: LeFavor-Tower Company, 1915), 249–63.

7. Smith, The History of the Nineteenth Regiment of Maine Volunteer Infantry, 1862–1865, 72–73.

8. Winfield Scott Hancock, “Report of Maj. Gen. Winfield S. Hancock,” in The War of the Rebellion: A Compilation of the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies, ser. 1, vol. 27, pt. 1 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1889), 372; William Harrow, “Report of Brig. Gen. William Harrow,” in The War of the Rebellion, ser. 1, vol. 27, pt. 1. The Hancock quotation is also reproduced in Smith, The History of the Nineteenth Regiment of Maine Volunteer Infantry, 1862–1865, 75.

9. Smith, The History of the Nineteenth Regiment of Maine Volunteer Infantry, 1862–1865, 73–74.

10. Ibid., 74.

11. Ibid., 74.

12. Grow, “Up and Down the Kennebec Valley: Memorial Day—Part 3.”

13. Library of Congress, Grand Army of the Republic and Kindred Societies: A Guide to Resources in the General Collections of the Library of Congress (Washington, DC: Library of Congress), introduction.

14. The Maine Register and Business Directory (1891), Fairfield entry, listing “Post Elbridge P. Pratt, No. 90” and its regular meeting schedule. The surviving edition is unpaginated.

15. Sanborn Map Company, Sanborn Fire Insurance Map from Fairfield, Somerset County, Maine, October 1884, sheet 1.

16. Sanborn Map Company, Sanborn Fire Insurance Map from Fairfield, Somerset County, Maine, December 1889, sheet 2.

17. Sanborn Map Company, Sanborn Fire Insurance Map from Fairfield, Somerset County, Maine, November 1895, sheet 2.

18. Sanborn Map Company, Sanborn Fire Insurance Map from Fairfield, Somerset County, Maine, November 1901, sheet 5.

19. Sanborn Map Company, Sanborn Fire Insurance Map from Fairfield, Somerset County, Maine, July 1911, sheets 1 and 8.

20. The Maine Register and Business Directory (1891), Fairfield entry; Sanborn Map Company, Sanborn Fire Insurance Map from Fairfield, Somerset County, Maine, November 1895, sheet 2; November 1901, sheet 5.

21. Fairfield Journal, January 10, 1918, 2.

22. Smith, The History of the Nineteenth Regiment of Maine Volunteer Infantry, 1862–1865, 72–75; Hancock, “Report of Maj. Gen. Winfield S. Hancock,” 372.

Bibliography

Adams, Silas. “The Nineteenth Maine at Gettysburg.” In War Papers Read Before the Commandery of the State of Maine, Military Order of the Loyal Legion of the United States. Vol. 4. Portland, ME: LeFavor-Tower Company, 1915.

Fairfield Historical Society. “Military Information.” Fairfield, Maine.

Grow, Mary. “Up and Down the Kennebec Valley: Memorial Day—Part 3.” The Town Line. May 24, 2023.

Hancock, Winfield Scott. “Report of Maj. Gen. Winfield S. Hancock.” In The War of the Rebellion: A Compilation of the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies. Series 1, vol. 27, part 1. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1889.

Harrow, William. “Report of Brig. Gen. William Harrow.” In The War of the Rebellion: A Compilation of the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies. Series 1, vol. 27, part 1. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1889.

Library of Congress. Grand Army of the Republic and Kindred Societies: A Guide to Resources in the General Collections of the Library of Congress. Washington, DC: Library of Congress.

Mitchell, Harry Edward, et al., comps. The Fairfield Register, 1904. Kent's Hill, ME: H. E. Mitchell Publishing Company, 1904.

Sanborn Map Company. Sanborn Fire Insurance Map from Fairfield, Somerset County, Maine. October 1884. Sheet 1.

———. Sanborn Fire Insurance Map from Fairfield, Somerset County, Maine. December 1889. Sheet 2.

———. Sanborn Fire Insurance Map from Fairfield, Somerset County, Maine. November 1895. Sheet 2.

———. Sanborn Fire Insurance Map from Fairfield, Somerset County, Maine. November 1901. Sheet 5.

———. Sanborn Fire Insurance Map from Fairfield, Somerset County, Maine. July 1911. Sheets 1 and 8.

Smith, John Day. The History of the Nineteenth Regiment of Maine Volunteer Infantry, 1862–1865. Minneapolis: Great Western Printing Company, 1909.

The Fairfield Journal. January 10, 1918.

The Maine Register and Business Directory. 1891.