Still o'er these scenes their memory wakes,To the general reader we trust they will be invested with interest, as contributions to some of the grandest pages of the history of our first century. ... In the summer of 1861, the old Boston Light Artillery had returned to Massachusetts, its three months term of enlistment, under the 75,000 call, having expired. Josiah Porter of Cambridge, an experienced officer of the old battery of the Massachusetts militia, was commissioned captain of a company of light artillery, to be recruited in Boston and its vicinity, the nucleus of the company to be perhaps those of the old command who should volunteer, and its officers selected from the practised numbers of that efficient corps. This, in brief, was the origin of the first battery of light artillery recruited in Massachusetts in response to the 500,000 call. The little recruiting office, then situated on Hanover Street, where the majority of the original number comprising this command signed the enlistment papers, has long since been removed; but the old armory building in Cooper Street still remains, where one hundred of our number, having been found physically qualified, were, on the 28th of August, 1861, mustered into the volunteer service of the United States, for the period of three years or during the war. Receiving at this place our fatigue uniforms, knapsacks, and blankets, we proceeded that afternoon to Camp Cameron, North Cambridge. This was on a farm extending from the old Lexington pike, which crosses Winter Hill, and thence over the ridge in Somerville to Arlington, south to North Avenue in Cambridge, or to the old pike that leads from Harvard Square in Old Cambridge to Arlington, and there unites with the road from Somerville. The southern half of the farm in Cambridge was a plateau of perhaps ten acres, extending back from the Cambridge road, and falling off quite abruptly to a meadow through which
And fondly broods with miser care;
Time but the impression deeper makes,
As streams their channels deeper wear.
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comrades we believe the incidents which we recall in our narrative are indelibly impressed.
Boston. Press of Deland and Barta, 1886.
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