Woburn.

Woburn's assignment was ninety-eight men and it came at a time when recruiting was dull. Still the selectmen, in obedience to State House orders, called a meeting of Union loving citizens in the Town Hall, on the evening of Saturday, the 12th of July. The response was large and enthusiastic; it was voted to give every volunteer a bounty of one hundred dollars and a committee of fifteen was appointed to forward enlistments. It was further voted to call a town meeting on the 24th of the month for the purpose of carrying out the provisions of this popular gathering. Thirty-three men had enlisted or put down their Aug., '62 names before the excitement began or the offer of bounty was made, and these men became "the immortal thirty-three" in company annals. Recruiting began on the 15th, and was very slow, though the office was open day and evening. At the town meeting, it was voted to give a bounty of one hundred and twenty-five dollars, and enlistments thereupon increased. Under the encouragement of a grand rally and a banquet in upper Lyceum Hall in the evening of the 24th, followed by a march through the streets accompanied by a brass band and speeches by prominent citizens, the roll of enlistments reached fifty names. Subsequent rallies and parades resulted in the securing of considerably more than the required number by the 1st of August. On the 5th of the month, after a collation in Lyceum Hall, escorted by the Fire Department, the company departed for the rendezvous, Camp Stanton, in Lynnfield, having the following commissioned officers: captain, John I. Richardson; first lieutenant, Luke R. Tidd; second lieutenant, Luther F. Wyman.

Life at a rendezvous camp is much the same, wherever found. The change from the untrammeled habits of home to the restrained conditions of military life is seldom made without friction on the part of the newly enlisted men, and if there were a lack of quarters, an insufficiency of food, and if the latter were of indifferent quality, they were only features to be expected wherever and whenever inexperienced citizens undertake the transforming act of becoming soldiers. However disagreeable some of the conditions at Camp Stanton may have been, nothing was encountered there that would not have been laughed at, when two years later the men were passing through the exactions of the "Battle Summer" or later still, when they realized the horrors of Salisbury and Andersonville. Nor were the days of Lynnfield altogether disagreeable to the recruits, for were there not the visits of home friends who always came laden with the best of goodies for the "boys," and passes for brief trips to the homes themselves? Besides every day had its round of duties, such as guard, the policing of the camp and the early induction to drill, even before the giving out of uniform and arms.

Col. Edward F. Jones, who had won distinction in the earlier months of the war as commander of the Sixth Regiment, and later had been assigned to the colonelcy of the Twenty-sixth Infantry, was in command of the camp and occasionally the newly made soldiers repined at the rigor of his commands, quite uncalled for to their undisciplined minds. Nothing, however, better exhibited the adaptability of the American soldier than the speed with which the material from school, shop and farm, caught the step, learned the manual and responded to the command of superior officers. In the case of the companies that were to constitute the Thirty-ninth Regiment, they arrived after the most of the desirable quarters had been taken by the men of the Thirty-fifth and the Thirty-eighth Regiments. The first named departed for the front on the 22nd of August; on the 24th, the Thirty-eighth took train for the South and as colonel went Timothy Ingraham who originally had been commissioned as the leader of the Thirty-ninth; a Captain in the Third Infantry during the three months' service, he had been lieutenant colonel in the Eighteenth Infantry and there were feelings of regret when the New Bedford officer was transferred to the earlier numbered organization.