Norwich and the Early Years

Charles Farnsworth was born in 1836 in Norwich, Connecticut, a small but prosperous New England port and industrial center with a population of 14,000. By the mid-1850s, shipping, shipbuilding, and manufacturing had made it one of the richest towns in Connecticut. It was estimated that Norwich led the state in the number of millionaires and had more millionaires per square mile than any city in America.

C. B. Rogers & Co. was a major producer of wood-working machinery. The Falls Mill and the Shetucket Company were important cotton textile manufacturers, and the Yantic Mill, Uncas Mill, and A. P. Sturtevant Mill turned out large quantities of woolen products. Industries ran on hydraulic power, which had been harnessed at nearby Yantic Falls since the 1660s. The Bacon Manufacturing Company, Mowry Company, and Norwich Arms Company turned out tens of thousands of pistols, muskets, and rifles for the Union during the Civil War. Norwich was probably second only to Springfield, Massachusetts as a Northern armory. After the war, the Norwich arms companies collapsed.

Norwich harbor, nestled in a backwater where the Shetucket and Yantic Rivers flow together to form the Thames, served freight and passenger steamers bound for New York, Philadelphia, Boston, and even the West Indies. Livestock, lumber, furniture, saddles, and textiles were major exports. The Norwich & Worchester Railroad brought goods to the harbor from northern Connecticut and Massachusetts. Norwich had been a center of shipbuilding since colonial times, turning out schooners, whaling vessels, and, in the 1800s, coastal steamers—three of which were converted into gunships for the US navy during the Civil War.

Norwich was also a haven for the Underground Railroad, helping escaped slaves to get to Canada. Like Connecticut as a whole, Norwich rejected the Whig Party's half-measures toward abolition in 1856, voting solidly in the presidential election for Republican John C. Fremont, who nevertheless lost to Democrat James Buchanan. In 1858, Republican William A. Buckingham, the mayor of Norwich and a friend of Charlie's family, was elected governor of Connecticut on an anti-slavery platform. Two years later, he faced a strong challenge from Democrat Thomas Seymour, who argued that acceptance of southern slavery was constitutionally required. Abraham Lincoln, himself a candidate for high office, responded to Buckingham's call for support by campaigning in Norwich and four other Connecticut towns. Additional support for Buckingham—and the cause of abolition—was stirred up by the young "Wide-Awakes" with their dramatic evening torchlight parades. Still, Buckingham won by only 541 votes of more than 88,000 cast. He never forgot Lincoln's helping hand, becoming one of the President's most reliable political supporters during the Civil War.

Charlie grew up in Norwich except for the six years (1845-50) that the family spent in Buffalo, New York, where is father helped found the antislavery Free Soil Party. On returning to Norwich, the family moved into an elegant home on East Main Street. After local elementary schooling, Charlie may have boarded at Monson Academy in Monson, Massachusetts. Testifying years later during an inquiry about Confederate prison conditions, Charlie referred to fellow officer William G. Ely, who did attend Monson, as a "schoolmate." Unfortunately, Monson Academy records do not exist for the 1850s. There is no evidence Charlie attended college.

In 1856, when he was only twenty, Charlie went off to Chicago, got into the iron foundry business, and was listed as a manufacturer of cast-iron stoves in the city directory for three years under the partnership name Johnston, Farnsworth & Co. Charlie left the firm in 1859 for unknown reasons, although five years later he was forced to explain to his fiancée what something he called "the Chicago affair" was all about. In any case, Charlie went off to Denver in 1859, probably by train and then stagecoach, and observed firsthand the second year of the Pikes Peak gold rush. He seems not to have done any actual prospecting on that trip.

Returning to Chicago for the winter, Charlie went back to the Rockies in the spring of 1860 to try his hand at the actual enterprise of digging for gold. Perhaps feeling a bit chagrined about catching gold fever, he asked his brother Fred not to reveal his whereabouts to his parents. "If asked," he wrote, "say I am travelling, selling goods, and that I am not in Chicago much." In the early spring of 1860, Charlie crossed the seven hundred miles from St. Joseph, Missouri, to Denver on a mule in the company of a family traveling in a mule-drawn wagon. It took them about three weeks.

Charlie and two other prospectors then promptly hiked forty miles out of Denver into the Rockies, to "Mountain City," a settlement near present-day Central City, where they rented a cabin. A few days later, while looking at "quartz claims" about fifteen miles from the cabin, the men got trapped in a four-foot snow storm. They survived the night with nothing more than their overcoats and a campfire. After beating a hasty retreat from the spring storms back to Denver, Charlie thought about waiting until summer to go deeper into the mountains. But he also began to cast his eye about for real estate and other business opportunities in Denver itself.

Whether he stayed longer in Denver is unknown. In the spring of 1861, after Abraham Lincoln had been elected and eleven states had seceded from the Union, Charlie was back in Norwich. The town and state were standing firmly with the new president, recognizing the bond he had cemented by his energetic campaigning for Buckingham a year earlier. Charlie's first response to the nation's political crisis was to try to get into the war supply business. He may have initially shied away from enlisting for combat because of the pessimistic tone of a letter he received from a friend, Captain E. K. Abbott, who was headed into the disastrous battle of First Manassas, July 1861. (Abbott survived.) Instead, Charlie got letters of introduction from Governor Buckingham to promote a field tent to neighboring governors who were also raising armies. The enterprise proved either unsuccessful or unsatisfying, however, and Charlie volunteered for military duty as an officer in mid-October 1861.

On both his paternal and maternal sides, Charlie descended from several generations of patriots and leaders. One grandfather, Amos Farnsworth, was a twenty-one year old farmer in Groton, Massachusetts, when he answered the call for American independence in April 1775 and marched off with his fellow minutemen to Concord just after the "shot...