On Friday, Mike Carroll, president of the Barrington town council, asked me for some background info. as he was preparing remarks for our Memorial Day observance. He was interested in Barringtonians who had made the ultimate sacrifice in military service — especially those from long ago. I looked through the Revolutionary and Civil War service records summarized in Thomas W. Bicknell’s 1898 History of Barrington. We had two men who may have died while serving in the Revolution, including Winchester Bicknell, who died in 1782 of disease contracted while imprisoned on one of those infamous prison hulks off New York, and Ebenezer Adams, who died at West Point in 1782, either during or shortly after completing a tour in the Continental Army.
Working alphabetically through the longer list of all who served in the Civil War, I found eight Barrington men who were killed in action or died in the field from injury or disease. The first, alphabetically, was 2nd Lieutenant Joseph Allen Chedel Jr., 1st Rhode Island Cavalry, killed in action in Virginia on 18 June 1863, two weeks before Gettysburg and six days before his 22nd birthday. The name struck me because he lived in our house: his father owned and occupied two thirds of it from 1854 until 1873. Joseph Jr. lived here only for four years, as a teenager. After finishing high school in Barrington he moved out on his own in Providence, where he was working as an apothecary’s clerk and apprentice when he enlisted, serving initially as a hospital steward. Showing promise, he was commissioned a 2d Lieutenant in the field in January 1863.
In Joseph Chedel’s honor we mounted a new flagpole on Saturday and are flying the colors here today.
Here is Joseph A. Chedel’s sketch from Memoirs of Rhode Island Officers Who were Engaged in the Service of Their Country During the Great Rebellion of the South (Providence, 1967), p. 440:
https://archive.org/details/memoirsofrhodeis00bart/page/n517/mode/2up
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