September 3, 2022

In June 2018, I decided to pick a forgotten Civil War soldier, doing so pretty randomly, and then try to reconstruct his life and his world as fully as possible. Wells Waite Miller came from a farming background and attended Oberlin Preparatory School. He enlisted in the U.S. Army in the spring of 1861 in response to President Abraham Lincoln’s call for men. He fought in the heat of the battle at Antietam without injury and was badly wounded at Gettysburg during what’s now called “Pickett’s Charge.” He went on to become a noted agriculturalist and businessman, serving as the