James Herrick was discharged from the U.S. In Middletown, at the Connecticut Hospital for the Insane, a member of this group died in near anonymity shortly after his arrival there. This group of elderly veterans represented a Civil War legacy of a different nature-soldiers who could no longer stay at Fitch’s Home due to the state of their mental health. For them, the Civil War existed in some heroic and rosy past. A new generation had emerged, one that had only dim memories of the Civil War, if any at all, and that understood that conflict largely through stone monuments erected on town greens. Americans by this time remembered the Civil War through an increasingly narrow and sentimental lens. In 1891 a group of 41 elderly Civil War veterans was transferred from Fitch’s Home for Soldiers and Orphans in Darien to the Connecticut Hospital for the Insane in Middletown.

O’Sullivan Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, Civil War Photographs Federal troops occupying line of breastworks on the north bank,” May 25, 1864. photo: Timothy H. “Union soldiers in trenches before Petersburg,” December 1864. Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, Civil War Photographs inset: North Anna River, Va.

Middletown civil war hospital