BETHEL — Historian Randall Bennett held history in his hands late Tuesday afternoon at one of the Bethel Historical Society‘s museums.

Gripped tightly in one hand was a long, double-bladed metal saw with a wooden handle; the other hand held a mangled metal ball, a bullet.

Bennett, the society’s executive director, said the “horrific” surgeons’ bone saw has one fine blade for cutting flesh and a rougher saw-toothed blade for cutting bone.

The bullet, he said, was taken from the hip of Daniel Martin Stearns of Bethel 20 years after he was wounded in 1862 at Antietam.

Both items are society artifacts from the Civil War and will join many others, including Civil War letters, diaries, photographs and the uniform of a Bethel general, in a new exhibit that opens in late May.

The exhibit will be the society’s contribution to the Maine Civil War Trail project, a statewide effort commemorating the 150th anniversary of The War Between the States.

The project showcases Civil War-related exhibits at 23 sites, from Bangor to Kennebunk and from Kingfield to Bethel, Bridgton and Livermore.

Bennett said the society now has a free 20-page, full-color guide to the Maine Civil War Trail, which opens this spring.

“It’s a nice series of exhibits for anyone that’s coming to Maine,” Bennett said.

“As a participant in this significant venture, the society will open an exhibit on May 28 titled In the Field & On the Homefront: Bethel During the Civil War.

“Using rarely seen artifacts and images from the society’s permanent collection, this exhibit explores the effects — profound and poignant — of the Civil War on Bethel,” Bennett said.

While the war years led to the loss of many of Bethel’s loyal sons, he said they also witnessed the town’s development as an important inland Maine center of commerce, industry and tourism.

Husbands, fathers and sons enlisted in the army and navy, sometimes on opposing sides, while women kept the home fires burning while supporting the troops as nurses, U.S. Sanitary Commission workers and spies, Bennett said.

Children worked on farms and in mills producing weapons, gunpowder and blankets. Some 70,000 Maine men and an uncounted number of women served on the battlefields, the guide states.

Thousands more labored at home to provide for the troops what the federal government could not. The exhibits along the Maine Civil War Trail will tell their stories, the guide states.

Participating Maine Civil War Trail institutions will showcase the state’s participation in and response to the war in collaborative fashion, Bennett said.

He said Bethel played a big role in the Civil War.

“Bethel was in the thick of it, we really were,” Bennett said.

He said Brig. Gen. Clark S. Edwards of Bethel “was a prominent leader” of the 5th Maine Regiment, one of Maine’s best regiments.

Its Company I was the only company organized in Bethel during the war, according to William B. Lapham in his 1891 book, “History of the Town of Bethel.”

Former longtime society Executive Director Stanley Howe, who retired in January, said Tuesday that 41 men from Bethel served in the 5th Maine.

In his “Life on the Home Front: Bethel during the Civil War” article first published in the society’s history journal, The Bethel Courier, in 1983, Howe said 28 Bethel men were killed or died of wounds received during the Civil War.

Bennett said Cpl. Sumner Needham, a Norway native and Bethel resident, was the first man killed during the Civil War during the Baltimore Riot in 1861.

However, Brian Swartz, an avid Civil War buff and the special sections editor of the Bangor Daily News, stated in a 2011 story that Confederate sympathizers killed Pvt. Addison Whitney of Belmont in Baltimore, eight days before Needham died of his injuries.

For more details and updates about the Maine Civil War Trail, visit www.mainecivilwartrail.org. For more information about the Bethel Historical Society, call 824-2908 or visit www.bethelhistorical.org.

tkarkos@sunjournal.com

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