1856.
Charles Brooks Brown.
Private 3d Mass. Vols. (Infantry), April 17–July 22, 186; private 19th Mass. Vols. (Infantry), August 23, 1861; Sergeant; re-enlisted December 20, 1863; died at Spottsylvania Court-House, Va., May 13, 1864, of a wound received in action May 12.Charles Brooks Brown was son of Major Wallace and Mary (Brooks) Brown, and was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, September 29, 1835. He was the sixth in a family of eleven children. He received his early education in the public schools of Cambridge, and at the age of eleven years entered the High School, He was a pupil of that school at the time when it was put under the charge of Mr. Elbridge Smith, who infused new life into the institution, and soon caused it to rank among the foremost schools of the country. Brown, like many others, caught a new spirit under the new administration. He had always exhibited quickness of mind and eagerness to do as well as others whatever interested him. But he had cherished no thought of ever receiving more than a common-school education, and had expected erelong to engage in the business of his father,—that of soap-making. The size of his family and the humbleness of his father's means seemed to forbid his receiving further advantages. As he himself once remarked, it had been one of his earliest pleasures as a boy to go to the College buildings on Commencement days and take a look at the mysterious alcoves of the Library, and watch the College processions, without suspecting that he himself would ever become a participant in similar scenes. But while at the High School the desire to go to college suddenly took possession of him. Up to this time his tastes had led him to take more interest in the natural sciences and in mathematics than in the classics, and he had many deficiencies in the latter to supply, within a
