AUGUSTA — Maine’s secretary of state is heading north to bring a Civil War-era ledger book back to its home in Penobscot County.

Matthew Dunlap was scheduled to deliver the ledger to the town hall in Mattawamkeag at 1 p.m. Friday. He was to be joined by Board of Selectmen Chairman John Whitehouse and Town Clerk Jodi Furge.

The Maine State Archives received the ledger in December after a staff member saw it on eBay and contacted the seller, who lives in Missouri, and she agreed to send it back to Maine at no charge.

Officials say the ledger lists the names of 19 families, including several Civil War veterans. The book details how much aid servicemen and their families received at the end of the war and the years that followed and itemizes the cost at the time of things like shoes, molasses and tobacco.

Some of the family names in the book are still listed among the 700 residents of the town.

According to information provided by the Secretary of State’s Office, one of the families listed in the ledger was the Bishop family, to whom the town of Mattawamkeag provided aid before and after David Bishop was killed at Petersburg, Virginia, on June 18, 1864.

Bishop, a farmer, was 41 when he joined the war effort in 1863. He was a member of Company D of the 1st Maine Heavy Artillery when the regiment that was ordered to make a frontal attack on an entrenched Confederate position. That attack lasted fewer than 10 minutes, yet the regiment sustained more than 600 casualties, of which Bishop was one. From the ledger entries, it can be inferred that Bishop’s widow did a lot of sewing. The provision of yards of cloth, needles and thread indicate a household that had all of that in short supply, and then needed the items with some regularity.


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