During a reunion, Charles Perham was injured in a gun powder explosion.

If you had entered the New York Stock Exchange on Broad Street in 1891, you might have seen an armless man with a full blonde beard selling pencils and pocket knives from a portable tray. This was Farmington war veteran Charles Perham’s twisted fate.

He was a teenager when he joined the army in 1864. His older brother Silas, already enlisted, moved to the Fourth Maine Battery to be with his brother, and the unit encamped near Petersburg, Va., during Grant’s nine-month siege. In the spring, after a general assault on the Confederate lines, the Union Army finally broke through and Petersburg fell in April. A week later Lee surrendered.

Twenty-eight soldiers in the Fourth Maine Battery died during the Civil War.

Charles must have considered himself lucky that he and his brother escaped that fate and returned to Farmington healthy and unhurt. Tall and strong, he went to work as a blacksmith while his brother established a livery stable.

A couple years after returning home, local veterans hosted a reunion. Having been in the artillery, Charles was chosen to join the squad to fire a salute to the Union forces. As he was ramming home a charge in the old rusty cannon, the gun powder exploded, hurling Charles to the ground. When the smoke cleared, his fellow veterans found him still alive but terribly mangled. His face and body were badly burned; his right arm had been torn off at the shoulder, his left shattered below the elbow. Charles had suffered an accident far more terrible than anything he had experienced in the midst of war.

His comfortable life as a blacksmith in a New England village was changed forever. Unable to practice a trade, he left his brother Silas and his home in Farmington to become a peddler, managing as best he could with what remained of his left arm. He wandered out to California where he sold his wares on a ferry between Oakland and San Francisco. Later he drifted eastward again, eventually resting in New York City where he frequented Broad Street, eking out a living selling trinkets to stock brokers.

Eventually, he returned to Farmington, probably to seek care from his brother who still ran the village livery stable. Here on a day in June he died at the age of 47, and his final resting place was not a Civil War battlefield or a New York City pauper’s grave but the Riverside Cemetery in his own hometown.

Additional research for this column by David Farady.

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