Towards the back of the Old Hopkinton Cemetery, a lichen-covered grave sits in the shade of a tree. The inscription, worn and faded with time, marks it as the grave of David Harrington, a Union soldier in the Civil War.
Harrington was a young Hopkinton native studying in Manchester when he enlisted in September of 1862. A month later, he was mustered in Concord as a private in Company H in the 14th Regiment of the New Hampshire Volunteer Army. He died of typhoid pneumonia in Poolsville, Maryland, four months later.
Harrington was 20 years old. He never saw battle.
His hat, a kepi, was sent home with his body, his name sewn on a tag inside. This April, more than 150 years later, the Hopkinton Historical Society acquired his cap through an online auction.
Adorned with an infantry horn, the kepi would have been particularly fashionable at the time.
Harrington’s cousins, Luther and Burleigh Jones, were also part of the war efforts. Burleigh wrote home frequently, and his letters have stayed with the family. The Hopkinton Historical Society has photocopies, though the originals are held by relatives Liz and Rick Brockman in Texas. Burleigh is Liz’s third-great uncle.
“I did Civil War reenacting, and my grandmother was still alive then, and she asked me, ‘Have you read the letters?'” said Liz, who has spent around three decades piecing together her family history. “She said she had family letters, so I was able to finally track them down.”
The letters, primarily from Burleigh, detail much of his everyday life starting in the 1850s. Faded and yellowed, the letters were transcribed by family members with some margin for error.
“I wish I was out there with you there is nothing going on here and I have loafed till I am as lasy [sic] as I well can be but school begins week after next and I guess I shall go,” he wrote on August 24, 1856, in a letter to his brother.
A later letter, dated July 28, 1861, three months after the start of the Civil War, reads: “Luther went for three months and was kept at Portsmouth until the first of this month and then was discharged but he says he shall enlist again and I guess he will but he had better stay at home and farm it for a while I think don’t you know I am going to.”
In the fall of 1862, at age 19, Burleigh enlisted as a Private in Company B of the Second Regiment New Hampshire Volunteer Army in the Civil War. Once mustered, he traveled to Virginia to fight the Confederacy.
After being on the frontlines, many soldiers sought to return home.
“I have almost made up my mind to go home too, and I don’t know yet,” Burleigh wrote in an undated letter from the Clarendon Hotel in Virginia.
He wrote home frequently, telling his friends and family about his life. He had started a small barber business, he sold pipes, he played the banjo. He also offered glimpses of life on the frontlines of the Civil War.
“[O]ur camp is on one part of the battle field and by going a short distance we find the graves very thick and a great many of them and the first day we came up here we saw a great many rebels laying untured and no less than seventy or eighty dead and rotten horses and if you ever saw a stink that was one… There is a scent there they cannot bury or get rid of,” he wrote in a letter dated June 13, 1862, sent from Fair Oaks, Virginia.
On June 25, 1863, Burleigh was wounded in both legs during the Battle at Fair Oaks. He died on July 1 at the age of 19, 10 days before his 20th birthday. He was buried in what is now the Hampton National Cemetery in Hampton, Virginia.
Burleigh has two additional burial markers: one in the Contoocook Village Cemetery, another in Concord’s Blossom Hill Cemetery.
His brother, Luther, also a member of Company B, survived the war, and is buried in Blossom Hill Cemetery alongside his family.
David Harrington’s hat, along with several other Civil War items, will be on display at the Hopkinton Historical Society beginning on August 3, alongside their ongoing “Ordinary People, Extraordinary Times: Hopkinton and the American Revolution” exhibit.
Copies of Burleigh Jones’s letters at the Hopkinton Historical Society on June 19, 2026. Credit: CLARA MACDOW / For the Monitor. 
A photo of Burleigh Jones in Martin A. Haynes’s “A history of the Secod New Hampshire Volunteer Infantry in the War of the Rebellion.” Credit: CLARA MACDOW / For the Monitor. 
Heather Mitchell, Executive Director of the Hopkinton Historical Society, opens Civil War soldier George J. Raymond’s writing kit on June 19, 2026. Credit: CLARA MACDOW / For the Monitor. 
David Harrington’s gravesite in the Old Hopkinton Cemetery on June 19, 2026. Credit: CLARA MACDOW / For the Monitor.
