An Irish-born captain of the 74th New York Infantry, taken prisoner at Williamsburg and exchanged in 1862, came home to Astoria, Queens, and stood among the founders of Advance Lodge.
Martin Willis was born in Ireland, carried a captain's commission through the Civil War, and became a charter member of Advance Lodge No. 635, which worked under dispensation in 1866 and was chartered in 1867. A roster line like that can be read in a second. Getting there took him from a New York enlistment office to a Confederate prison and back to Astoria, Queens, where veterans, neighbors who had followed their fortunes in the papers, and a new lodge all belonged to the same small world. In postwar Queens, fraternal life was one of the places where the war's survivors took up their civic lives again. (1, 2, 3, 9)
A Captain's Commission
Willis enrolled on May 15, 1861, at New York City, to serve three years. The state roster gives his age as forty, which made him older than much of the rank and file he would command. It does not say where in Ireland he was born, and the records give his age slightly differently depending on who was counting, so his birth year is best left a little soft. (9)
On November 9, 1861, he mustered in as captain of Company K, 74th New York Infantry, one of the regiments of Sickles's Excelsior Brigade. He was an original captain of the company. His formal commission was dated May 1, 1862, but the paperwork reached back and gave him rank from the day he mustered in. By then the regiment had joined the Army of the Potomac, and the spring campaign up the Virginia Peninsula was taking shape. (9)
The Woods Beyond Fort Magruder
The Battle of Williamsburg, fought on May 5, 1862, was a rearguard action. The Confederates had pulled out of Yorktown and meant to slow the Union pursuit, and they did, in rain, mud, and confusion, around Fort Magruder and the redoubts of the Williamsburg Line. Tactically it was inconclusive. For the families of Queens it was something else entirely. (11)
A soldier's letter from camp near Williamsburg, dated May 8 and printed in a Jamaica paper, placed “Capt. Willis, of Astoria” among the officers in the hottest part of the fight. In the same letter, the writer added that the captain was missing and feared taken. Two weeks later the Brooklyn Evening Star gathered Queens County's losses into one column, noting that the fight held a “deep and peculiar interest” for the county. Among the killed, wounded, and missing from Flushing, Jamaica, Hempstead, and Newtown, one entry read: Captain Martin Willis, (Astoria) Co. K., 74th Regiment, (Sickles Brigade,) taken prisoner. His hometown stood in parentheses before his company, as though readers needed to know whose neighbor he was before they learned which regiment he served in. (2)
Prisoner of War, and the Long Way Back
A Confederate newspaper report of May 9, reprinted in the New York Times nine days later, described a column of several hundred Union prisoners arriving in the Confederate capital under cavalry guard, marching in a hollow square through dust and eating bread as soon as they were allowed to buy it. A list of the officers among them included Martin Willis, Co. K, 74th N.Y. (3)
Little else survives about his months in captivity, but one newspaper item gives a glimpse. In early August, the Times printed a program for a field day among Union officers held as prisoners: a grand pig race, a sack race, wheelbarrow races with the runners blindfolded, and a match game of baseball with a silver medal for the winners. At third base was Martin Willis, Seventy-fourth New-York. (4)
Later that month, a list of officers reaching Fortress Monroe from Southern prisons, printed in Syracuse on August 21, carried his name. The formal accounting came in War Department General Orders, No. 147, dated September 30, 1862. It recorded Captain Martin Willis, 74th New York Volunteers, as exchanged on September 21 at Aiken's Landing, Virginia, for Captain S. F. Chipley of the 2d Kentucky. He was discharged on March 18, 1863. The records do not say why, and this account will not guess. (5, 10, 9)
What the Neighborhood Remembered
Between his discharge and the 1866 dispensation, the surviving sources go quiet about him. What the earlier newspaper trail does show is how closely Astoria and its neighbors watched their own. Casualty and prisoner lists in the Queens and Brooklyn papers were read as news from home, and a man listed with his village beside his name was a man whose standing was already public. (2)
That was the world into which Advance Lodge No. 635 arrived in the first years after the war, working under dispensation in 1866 and receiving its charter in 1867. Lodges of the period drew men whose identities had been shaped by service, by their standing on the block, and by what their neighbors knew of them. Willis, then in his mid-forties, was one of those who stood at the founding. The lodge's records list him among the charter members. (1)
A Short Notice
Not quite a decade after the charter, the New York Daily Herald of January 11, 1876, carried a plain notice: Martin Willis died at Astoria on Sunday evening, January 9, in the 58th year of his age, with the funeral to be held at his late residence on Wednesday at three o'clock. The notice named no regiment and no rank. Those details lived in the rosters, the casualty columns, and the memory of the people who had read them. (6)
His widow, Ann E. Willis, carried the family forward for decades. When she died in 1908, at about eighty, the Brooklyn Daily Times reported that she had lived in Long Island City for more than half a century. The Times Union described her as the widow of Capt. Martin Willis, who had served with distinction during the Civil War. She was survived by two daughters, Sister Helen Maria of St. Joseph's Convent in Brentwood and Mrs. A. M. Sano of Hartford, Connecticut. She was buried in Astoria Cemetery. (7, 8)
The Name That Carried a Story
A charter roll is mostly a list of names, and most of them come down to us with little attached. Willis's came with a regiment, a prison, an exchange order, and a hometown that had once read it among the missing. Advance Lodge was founded by neighbors, and in those first years that included a veteran who had left Astoria as a captain, been counted lost on a Virginia field, and returned to put his name to a lodge. When the lodge looks back at its first generation, he is one of the men who shows that the founding began well before the charter did.
Endnotes
Lodge Records
- Advance Lodge No. 635, F. & A.M., charter member records listing Martin Willis as a charter member. Dispensation 1866; charter 1867. Return to text
Newspapers
- Brooklyn Evening Star, May 23, 1862, p. 2: army correspondence from camp near Williamsburg (reprinted from the Jamaica Democrat) and casualty and prisoner list, “The Fight at Williamsburgh.” Return to text
- New York Times, May 18, 1862: “Yankee Prisoners,” reprinting a Confederate newspaper report of May 9, 1862. Return to text
- New York Times, August 8, 1862, p. 6: program of prisoner field-day exercises. Return to text
- Syracuse Daily Courier and Union, August 21, 1862, p. 3: “Arrival of Union Prisoners at Fortress Monroe.” Return to text
- New York Daily Herald, January 11, 1876, p. 9: death notice of Martin Willis. Return to text
- Brooklyn Daily Times, October 2, 1908, p. 8: obituary of Mrs. Ann E. Willis. Return to text
- Times Union (Brooklyn), October 2, 1908, p. 3: “Widow of Capt. Willis Dies in Her 81st Year.” Return to text
Public and Military Records
- New York State Military Museum and Veterans Research Center, 74th Infantry Civil War roster, entry for Willis, Martin. Return to text
- War Department, Adjutant General's Office, General Orders No. 147, September 30, 1862 (digitized by the National Library of Medicine, NIH): list of officers exchanged September 21, 1862, at Aiken's Landing, Virginia. Return to text
Background
- Accounts of the Battle of Williamsburg, May 5, 1862, Peninsula Campaign. Return to text
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