Abby Estey was born in 1842, the first child of Jacob and Desdemona Estey. Jacob Estey was the founder of the Estey Organ Company. Miss Estey attended Brattleboro schools, including the Glenwood Seminary in West Brattleboro. The Estey’s lived on the east side of Canal Street. In 1865 Abby married a machinist and mechanical engineer with the Estey Organ Company, Levi Fuller. Fuller would go on to become Vice President of the Estey Organ Company and, in 1896, Governor of Vermont.
In 1928 a compilation of Abby (Estey) Fuller’s addresses given to the Brattleboro Chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution were published. The following text comes from her written recollections of Brattleboro in the Civil War years.
“Brattleboro, at the beginning of the war, had business interests in the South. Ira Miller’s carriages and wagons were sold to Southern planters on account of their thorough workmanship and durability. Our Water Cures were patronized largely by people of Southern wealth. They brought some of their slaves with them; gay-turbaned black nurses were a common sight on our streets in my childhood.
The Buckners from Louisiana, the Stoddards from Savannah, and many from Charleston, South Carolina, summered here. They worshipped with us in our churches on the Sabbath; they loved our hills and streams; and some stayed late in the autumn to see the reds and yellows of our maples that shaded our streets. Two families built lovely summer homes here. But after the war came, the Water Cures felt the loss of Southern patronage.
I think I shall never forget the day the news came that Sumter had been fired on. Upon my return from school at noon I noticed my mother’s face and asked what dreadful thing had happened, and she told me the startling news that Sumter had been fired upon and that President Lincoln had called for seventy five thousand troops for three months.
Our own State responded, and on the 8th of May the First Vermont Regiment, commanded by our own citizen, Colonel Phelps, was mustered into service…Our village was a hotbed of patriotism. Everyone who in any way showed sympathy for the South was made to run up the American Flag, and some who found they were looked upon with suspicion as to their loyalty, moved out of town.
After Governor Fairbanks’ term of office expired and Governor Holbrook became the Executive, Holbrook established his headquarters at the Brattleboro House, and from that time on, uniforms of blue, shoulder straps and brass buttons were plentiful.
In 1862, after McClellan’s disastrous Peninsula campaign, President Lincoln called for three hundred thousand more troops for nine months, and in less than one month, four thousand men were in camp here at the Fair Ground.
I think that but few weeks passed when in my early home we did not have as guests those who came to say ‘good bye’ to some son or brother or husband who was going off with his regiment. As I look back over those years, it seems as though I slept on damp pillows every night for the sorrows of those heartbreaking times.
Whenever a regiment left for the seat of war, the Brattleboro women made hot coffee and served food to the men; and they were busy indeed, after the first battles of the war, sewing, knitting, rolling bandages and scraping lint. The Sanitary Commission and the Christian Commission received the goods and distributed them in army and field hospitals as they were needed.
The art of canning fruit had not become so general in those days, but we had jellies of all kinds and dried fruits in sugar which were sent at regular periods to the front. Then the boxes of good things that were sent to boys of our own regiments were often on the way, and the pleasure we all felt at doing something to cheer those who were trying to save our country, was great.
In the summer of 1862, it was decided by the Government that a hospital should be built here (at the Fair Ground) for our sick soldiers, who were dying so fast with malaria and other diseases which were caused by the climate and poor water…The dry bracing air, with the breath of pines, and the dry sandy soil, did wonders for the poor soldiers. And later wounded men were sent here.
Three days after the Battle of Gettysburg, men wounded in that battle were brought here. It seems as though I can hear now the rumble of John Ray’s wagons as they went by after the late train at night, taking the poor fellows to the hospital.
The hospital was a great relief to the people of Brattleboro whose homes were on South Main or Canal Street, for before the hospital was built, nearly every house had a sick soldier in it to care for, and many of them died. It was pitiful but no one refused to take a sick soldier in if it were possible to do so.
People were allowed to visit the wards, and carry things to entertain the convalescents. How they did enjoy looking over our photograph albums, and books of prints. Some did so want some home cooking. One poor boy wanted custard pie and, with the help of my mother, I managed to get one up there.
During the war, the woolen factory in Thomasville was started up by Jordan, Marsh & Co., where woolen blankets were made for the army. Our hospital was supplied with good blankets, linen sheets and spreads, iron beds and hair mattresses. Soldiers from other states were sometimes included in the Government Hospital here, as the markers in the soldiers lot in our cemetery show that some died here.
The memory of those four awful years seems like a dreadful dream. How often some of our own dead were brought back here for burial. The military funeral, the flag-draped coffin, the muffled drum, will long be remembered by those of us who were born in the ‘40’s.
Quite a number of my classmates from Glenwood Seminary were married or engaged just as their lovers started for war. One classmate was secretly married. Her parents disliked the young man. How I pitied her! It was hard to study the doings of the Ancient Greeks when your mind was upon other worries, and you could never tell but you might be a widow any day.
One girl I knew married her boyfriend as he was starting for the war, and when the Regiment was in winter quarters in Virginia, the Government allowed visitors. Several young officers’ wives went down accompanied by returning officers on furlough. This girl, just eighteen, was getting ready to start with the others when her father said, ‘My daughter, you cannot go to Virginia. I forbid it.’ She replied, ‘I am married. I am eighteen years old, and I am going to my husband.’ She went and had a happy three weeks visit. In just three months she took another journey to Virginia, on the sad errand of finding her husband’s body hastily buried on that awful Wilderness battlefield. She found his body, put it in the coffin she had taken with her, brought it back to Vermont, and laid him beside his kindred.
God grant that the present generation may never know what my generation and the one before me endured during those four awful years.”