A 16 year old war prisoner discovers
there are worse things than hunger and cold.

Charlie Fairbanks from Bethel, was taken prisoner on this day in 1863. Fairbanks had enlisted in the Civil War a little less than a year earlier. He was just 16 years old and very good with a gun. So good, in fact, that his age had been ignored and he was accepted into the Vermont Company of sharpshooters.

He was taken prisoner at Gettysburg, and was forced to lay without food or fire all night. As it turned out, that was the easy part.

Fairbanks could hear the cries and groans of wounded men who still lay on the field of battle. In a memoir of his military service, Fairbanks would refer to this as the longest night of his life.

Photo courtesy Notes of Army and Prison Life 1862-1865 by Charlie Fairbanks and compiled and edited by Janet Hayward Burnham.

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