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Two non-commissioned officers of the 29th Maine pose with the regimen-tal mascot, Major, shown sitting on one of the men’s laps. Major was killed in April 1864 at the Battle of Mansfield in Louisiana. This photo appeared in Time-Life’s series of books on the Civil War. (Nicholas Picerno collection)

Maj. William Knowlton was one of the 29th Maine’s officers who paid the ultimate price, dying at the battle of Winchester during the 1864 Shenandoah Valley campaign. (Nicholas Picerno collection)

Portrait of Col. George H. Nye, whose letters, now in the Picerno collection, tell of having been shot in the face at the battle of Cedar Creek. (Nicholas Picerno collection)

Civil War Treasures

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which grimly held Little Round Top at Get-tysburg against repeated Confederate assaults, but it did make significant contributions and ended up burnishing its reputation to a high and enduring luster.

The names trip from Picerno’s tongue rapidly and confidently, spoken with the assurance of a man whose research has cost him many sleepless nights in many dusty archives: Antietam, Winchester, Sabine Cross Roads, Pleasant Hill, Mansfield, Cedar Creek, Fisher’s Hill. His voice notches down a bit as other names come to him: George Beal, William Knowlton, John Gould, George Nye, Charles Emerson. He knows these men, he knows what they endured.

Here’s a weapon. Here’s a photograph of the man who owned that weapon, cradling it in the crook of his arm. Here’s the uniform that man was wearing the day a Confeder-ate bullet or shell ended his life. Here’s a stack of letters he wrote to a sweetheart, or a wife, describing his longing for home and his thoughts on life, death, God and country. Here is American history in its purest, most evocative form. It’s enough to turn a collector into a historian.

Which Picerno is. Yes, the collection he houses is huge. Pistols, rifles, sabers, uniforms, accoutrements, diaries, letters, photographs, commissions signed by Abraham Lincoln, even camp stools and trunks, swell every avail-able inch of space. But it has been Picerno’s relentless drive to connect these artifacts with the men who owned them that has created the country’s foremost authority on this Maine regiment, and made him a sought-after historical resource for Civil War writers such as James McPherson and Jeffrey Wert, and Time-Life books.

“Growing up, I was always interested in history,” said Picerno, a native of Queens, N.Y. “I did really well at it in school. In my early teens, I took a trip to Florida from New York and on the way stopped at the Fredericksburg National Battlefield Park. It was there that the bug bit me.

“The next year,” he said, “my brother and I went to Gettysburg. That did it. I was hooked.”At about this time, Picerno made friends with an elderly gentleman in Queens who dealt in

“You can’t collect everything. Plus, a sword is a sword is a sword. i wanted to collect things that had a known history. i wanted to know who owned the sword. What did he do in the war? What was his life like? How did he die?”

— nick Picerno

Col. George L. Beal, who would rise to the rank of brigadier general and command the 10th and 29th Maine, is shown in this May 1863 photograph posing with the flag of the 10th Maine. (Nicholas Picerno collection)

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American military antiques. Captivated by the items in the man’s shop, Picerno took to collecting, amassing uniforms, artillery projectiles, weapons – whatever struck his fancy. And then it came to him that he had to seek specificity rather than generality.

“You can’t collect everything,” he said. “Plus, a sword is a sword is a sword. I wanted to collect things that had a known history. I wanted to know who owned the sword. What did he do in the war? What was his life like? How did he die?”

The focus he sought came about in 1978 when Picerno was a deputy sheriff in Moore County, N.C. A friend in Maine acquired a trunk with a uniform in it. The trunk had belonged to Col. George Beal of the 10th Maine. Picerno bought the trunk and uniform and, not long after that, bought a photograph album bearing the carte-de-visite likenesses of 20 men from the 10th Maine. The journey to build a connected collection then began in earnest.

Over the years, Picerno has raided the vaults of antique dealers nationwide, duked it out on the floors of auction houses, played the Internet-auction game and, when it became widely known that he was searching for 1st, 10th and 29th Maine artifacts, obtained items directly from the descendants of soldiers.

“These descendants have contacted me and offered me their great-grandfather’s letters, photos, weapons and other artifacts because they realize their value as a whole, and they know these things will be kept together and interpreted in connection with their ancestor’s lives and achievements.”

Interpreting such a vast array of artifacts requires, of course, assiduous research and a never-flag-ging sense of mission. Picerno’s is a familiar face in the National Archives in Washington, D.C., where he has rooted out great chunks of information about the men who fought with the 1st, 10th and 29th

Photograph of the winter camp of the 29th Maine Infantry, taken the winter of 1864-65 at Stephenson’s Depot, Va., near Winchester. (Nicholas Picerno collection)

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Maine. A prime source for him, he said, are the applications for pensions, in which the soldiers had to give detailed accounts of their service and attach corroborating documentation. This treasure trove of information has made it possible for him to piece together the lives of men who, for all intents and purposes, have largely been forgotten by the world at large.

The thrill and value of connective collecting – that is, affixing a history to an artifact – can quickly be understood with one look at a recent Picerno acquisition. It is a Confederate saber, belt and scabbard, captured from a Southern cavalry guerilla at a farmhouse near Bollington in Loudon County.

Two companies of the 10th Maine surrounded the farmhouse and captured three Confederate cavalrymen who were part of “White’s Commanches,” a unit commanded by Capt. Elijah V. White of the 35th Battalion of Virginia. The regimental historian of the 10th and 29th Maine kept an inven-tory book of items captured by the unit, and dutifully logged in the liberated 1833 dragoon saber.

To emphasize the connectiv-ity, Picerno smoothly produces a copy of the inventory book and points to the Oct. 21, 1862, entry. He adds that the farmhouse and barn where the Confederates were captured are still standing, and cooly mentions that in his collection are photographs of some of the men who made the capture.

But as exhilarating as it is to hold a captured Confederate saber, see the inventory book into which it was logged, and view photos of the men who made the seizure, nothing brings home the pathos and tragedy of the Ameri-can Civil War as do the thousands of handwritten letters in Picerno’s collection. Here are voices from the past communicating what it was like to march, fight, take a bullet in the face and survive, stand guard duty, watch executions and fear daily for their lives.

“These letters speak to us across the years about the people who wrote them – what made them leave the farms and mills and factories and take up arms,” Picerno said. “It makes me think about today’s situation, in Iraq, these young people, some of whom are our graduates and have asked me to write reference letters for them to go into the military. They know what they’re facing, just as the young men of the North and the South did in 1861. There’s a connection there, as well.”

Picerno, a career police chief whose career in law enforcement led him to Bridgewater College in 2002, said he continues to collect items from the Maine regiment. One day the collection will go to his son, who is a police officer in Maryland. Beyond that, there is the possibility of the items finding their way into a suitable museum.

Until then, Picerno – who also works for battlefield preservation as a trustee of the Shenandoah Valley Battlefield Foundation and chairs the committee on education and interpretation – will keep working to bring home to today’s Americans pieces of this country’s most violent and defining hour.

Charles Culbertson is Bridgewater College’s director of media relations and editor of Bridgewater magazine.

Picerno and two of his prized portraits. Left is Col. George L. Beal, and right is Col. George H. Nye. Photo by Tommy Thompson