![\"\"](\"http:\/\/housedivided.dickinson.edu\/sites\/150th\/files\/2011\/01\/humiston.jpg\" "\\"Humiston\\"")
<\/a>Amos Humiston<\/p><\/div> Sources<\/strong> Excerpt from a letter from Humiston to his wife Philinda, dated May 9, 1863:<\/p>\n I got the likeness of the children and it pleased me more than anything you could have sent me. How I want to see them and their mother is more than I can tell. I hope that we may live to see each other again if this war does not last to[o] long.<\/p>\n Places to Visit<\/strong> Narrative Amos Humiston was a farmer and tanner from upstate New York who yearned to see the world and even served for a year on a whaling ship when he was a young man. He married Philinda Smith (1831-1913) and the couple raised three children –Franklin Humiston (1855-1912), Alice Humiston (1857-1933), and Frederick Humiston (1859-1918)\u2014before […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[8651,3974],"tags":[156,13],"class_list":["post-1818","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-fighting-for-liberty","category-terrible-war-1861-1865","tag-images","tag-letters"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/housedivided.dickinson.edu\/sites\/150th\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1818","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/housedivided.dickinson.edu\/sites\/150th\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/housedivided.dickinson.edu\/sites\/150th\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/housedivided.dickinson.edu\/sites\/150th\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/housedivided.dickinson.edu\/sites\/150th\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1818"}],"version-history":[{"count":24,"href":"https:\/\/housedivided.dickinson.edu\/sites\/150th\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1818\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2774,"href":"https:\/\/housedivided.dickinson.edu\/sites\/150th\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1818\/revisions\/2774"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/housedivided.dickinson.edu\/sites\/150th\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1818"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/housedivided.dickinson.edu\/sites\/150th\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1818"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/housedivided.dickinson.edu\/sites\/150th\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1818"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\nNarrative<\/strong>
\nAmos Humiston was a farmer and tanner from upstate New York who yearned to see the world and even served for a year on a whaling ship when he was a young man. He married Philinda Smith (1831-1913) and the couple raised three children –Franklin Humiston (1855-1912), Alice Humiston (1857-1933), and Frederick Humiston (1859-1918)\u2014before Amos entered the Union army as a sergeant in the 154th New York infantry regiment. He was killed on the first day of the Battle of Gettysburg, found clutching an image of his young children, but with no other identification. Eventually, the Philadelphia Inquirer<\/em> published the story in an article entitled, \u201cWhose Father Was He?\u201d which was reprinted across the North and which eventually led to the discovery of the Humiston family in the village of Portville. Soon after the war ended, Philinda and the children settled in an orphanage created for them and other families of Union veterans in Gettysburg. Their descendants are alive today.<\/p>\n
\nKey secondary sources include Errol Morris\u2019s five-part blog post<\/a> at the New York Times<\/em> and Mark H. Dunkelman’s Gettysburg\u2019s Unknown Soldier: The Life, Death and Celebrity of Amos Humiston<\/a><\/em> (1999). In addition, one of the best sources on the death during this period is Drew Gilpin Faust’s This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War<\/a><\/em> (2008).<\/p>\n
\nIn 1993 a historical marker<\/a> was installed near the location where a Gettysburg resident found Humiston’s body. While in Gettysburg you can also visit the Gettysburg National Military Park Museum and Visitor Center<\/a> and the David Wills House<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"