Brunswick is a truly lovely town. My father lived his last years here and often said that, outside of marrying my mother, moving to Brunswick was the best decision he ever made. The photographs are terrific--and he'd have enjoyed seeing them!
Joshua Chamberlain is one of my favorites--I don't understand his detractors (except to guess that their research is scanty). About the war, he wrote:
“Slavery and freedom cannot live together. Had slavery been kept out of the fight, the Union would have gone down. But the enemies of the country were so misguided as to rest their cause on it, and that was the destruction of it and of them. We did not go into that fight to strike at slavery directly; we were not thinking to solve that problem, but God in his providence, in his justice, in his mercy, in his great covenant with our fathers, set slavery in the forefront, and it was swept aside as in a whirlwind, when the mighty pageant of the people passed on to its triumph.”
As I did the follow-up on the local soldiers that I researched--on the veteran days of those who survived--I often came upon his name. He came to my town to dedicate the Civil War cannon in the park and he often worked as governor to better the condition of Maine veterans, Indeed, he seems to be among the earliest to recognize what we call "PTSD". The national organization, dedicated to assistance to wounded veterans, is called "The Joshua Chamberlain Society"; it is headquartered in Texas, not Maine.