10/23/2026
From the Curator:
There are days in this job that take my breath away and make me thankful for the privilege to do this work. Today is one of those days.
While going through boxes of Fiske Family archives, I found 13 letters written by Samuel Fiske to his family at home in Shelburne Falls during the Civil War. I have yet to read them all but this one struck me immediately.
Here Samuel writes to his wife Lydia while under fire from the enemy, lying on the field at Antietam. He describes the fighting of the previous day, Sept. 17th, as “a most tremendous and terrible battle.”
September 17, 1862 remains the bloodiest day in American history, with 22,726 people dead, wounded, and missing. Samuel describes this carnage, while “at least a dozen bullets have whizzed just over our heads since I began to write this…and two or three struck the ground not more than from six to twenty feet in front of me.”
Samuel Fiske would go on to become the famous wartime writer Dunn Browne, whose correspondence from the battlefield was published across the nation. Jerry Hoyt wrote a biography of Samuel in our Summer 2026 issue of the Mount Massaemet Shadows, available on our website if you would like to learn more.
