BETHEL – He had a premonition and told a friend that morning, “Make sure my body is sent home.”

Marching with his unit on their way to answer Abraham Lincoln’s call for soldiers, Sumner Henry Needham was beaten by an angry mob with a paving stone in the streets of Baltimore on April 19, 1861. He died eight days later, becoming the first mortally wounded man in the Civil War.

His body was returned to a grieving Hannah, the pregnant wife who’d asked him not to go, the one he’d assured everything would be OK.

“If the story is presented properly, you’ll cry,” said Elizabeth Charlton, vice president of the Lawrence Civil War Memorial Guard. She’s the unofficial keeper of his grave in Bellevue Cemetery in Lawrence, Mass.

Massachusetts celebrates him now, but Needham didn’t get his start there.

Long before he took up arms, and a spot in history, Needham grew up in Bethel.

Born in 1828, he worked a family farm there with his parents, Evi and Maria, and left for Lawrence at 21 in search of a job, according to a short entry in the book “A Distant War Comes Home to Maine.”

He’d been in and out of the militia when President Lincoln asked for soldiers, Charlton said. Needham, then 33, was a corporal in the Sixth Regiment of the Massachusetts Volunteer Militia.

“When the call came for troops, he dropped his ax and went running down to the armory, ‘All set, I’m ready to go,'” she said. “He sent (Hannah) a letter, basically stating that everything would be fine. He knew that she was unhappy.”

Troops were sent from Boston with pomp, and on that fateful morning, left the President Street Station in Baltimore on foot, marching to catch a connecting train across town.

“He said to a comrade, ‘I sense there will be trouble today, I fear I will not make it out alive,'” Charlton said.

“They get off and there’s this unruly mob waiting for them.”

Someone in the crowd fired shots. A riot broke out. Three other militia men and dozens of civilians died in the street.

“(Needham was) first to fall, I believe, that’s what we’ve always been told,” she said.

The deadly fray made it into the Maryland state song, Charlton said. “That ‘patriotic blood that flecks the street of Baltimore’? That’s Sumner Needham’s blood.”

Efforts to save him by drilling holes to relieve pressure in his crushed skull didn’t work. He died in an infirmary.

“The entire city of Lawrence shut down when they brought the body back,” she said.

There was an hours’ long sermon. He was remembered as an upright man. Charlton’s been part of a re-enactment of the processional to the cemetery, playing Hannah.

Seven months after her husband’s death, Hannah named their only son Sumner Henry Needham.

“She kept her head up and she set an example for everyone else in the city,” said Charlton. “If she could do this, we can all do this.”

The memorial guard is fund raising now for new canons and a fence around the cemetery monument Lawrence erected for Needham in 1862.

There’s another effort afoot to save the train station Needham and his compatriots left before the riots.

Ralph Vincent, treasurer of Friends of President Street Station, said the station-turned-Civil War museum is being eyed for a space for a 26-story hotel.

“You have this wonderful opportunity to tell these stories where they actually happened,” said Vincent.

Its status is going before Baltimore’s city council next week.

On Monday, Memorial Day, guard members will lead a walking tour of Civil War graves in Bellevue Cemetery at 10:30 a.m. In Lawrence, people know Needham’s story, Charlton said. In Maine, she has her doubts.

“The big point in all of this is that he doesn’t get forgotten,” she said. “That’s the biggest point of all: We don’t forget who he is.”

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