This is to announce a new book I'm publishing next month titled The Ames Manufacturing Company of Chicopee, Massachusetts - A Northern Factory Town's Perspective on the Civil War.
It will be comprised of two essays previously appearing on this blog, in addition to a third article never before published, and will contain many photographs. Here is an excerpt from the foreword:
The three articles that comprise this book tell different
stories about the Ames Manufacturing Company of Chicopee, Massachusetts, which
played an important role as an arms manufacturer during the American Civil
War. Together, they make up a kind of
composite of the Northern Civil War experience in the small, but dynamic,
universe of a factory town. We meet
Nathan P. Ames and James T. Ames, brothers who founded the firm, the younger
burdened with the responsibility after the tragic and grisly death of the
older.
We meet two workers in the factory, one of whom, Charles
Tracy, was a machinist who left his position to join the army, and came home
without a leg—and was awarded the Medal of Honor. He was cared for by Clara Barton--and comforted by President Abraham Lincoln on a visit to his hospital ward. The other man, Melzar Mosman, just a boy of
nineteen, worked in the foundry department forging canon. He also left to join the army, but after the
war would become celebrated for forging bronze statuary, including a number of
Civil War monuments.
We meet the townspeople of Chicopee, the minister who hid
slaves on the local Underground Railroad, and the high school principal, who
purchased a military substitute to fight in his place. Later, he would become Governor of
Massachusetts and the successful defense lawyer of the infamous Lizzie Borden.
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