(upbeat music) - The Fifth Maine Museum is a historic site on Peaks Island.

It was built in 1888 by the veterans of the Fifth Maine Regiment who fought during the Civil War.

It was built as a reunion center so they could gather annually with fellow soldiers for their annual reunions.

They had come to Peaks Island previously before 1888, and they were staying in tents, and they decided in 1887 to build this building.

And it opened in August, 1888.

It's a combination of the Queen Anne and the Shingle style, which is a really common architectural style on the coast of Maine, coast of New England.

It has a tower, it has a wonderful ocean view and a wraparound porch because it was primarily used in the summer by the veterans.

They would come here with their families, enjoy the cool ocean breezes, have business meetings, and campfires, and just enjoy their time on in the Maine coast.

(upbeat music) (guns firing) - When the Confederacy fired on Fort Sumter in Charleston, South Carolina, they ignited the war, and President Lincoln's initial response was to call up 75,000 volunteer troops.

And he tasked each of the states with a quota of how many troops to provide to put down the rebellion as they saw it at that time.

Part of Maine's response was to muster the state militia, but they also decided to raise regiments.

One of the first regiments raised by the state of all volunteers was the Fifth Maine volunteer infantry.

So the Fifth Maine as a regiment was about a thousand men composed of 10 companies.

And so three of those regiments were raised right here in Portland.

And because that was the largest body of men that formed the regiment, the nickname for the Fifth Maine was the Forest City regiment after Portland's nickname, other towns that contributed regiments were Gorham, Lewiston, Brunswick, Saco, Biddeford.

And these were citizens who had never fought before.

So they were people who were shopkeepers, they were farmers, they were fishermen.

- The men when they enlisted were typically pretty young, 17, 18, 19, 20 years old.

Many of them at that time had never left the state of Maine, or they hadn't gone very far from their small town.

So they were joining up because they were sort of were swept up in that fervor of beating the Confederacy and preserving the Union.

But they were young men and they were widely inexperienced.

And so this was a big, big, big part of their lives, a very formative part of their lives.

- This regiment assembled in South Portland.

They had some basic training, and then they took a train south to Boston, and they found themselves in the army of the Potomac, which was the sort of Maine fighting force in the Eastern Theater of the war.

And they fought for three years.

Their term of enlistment for most of the men was three years.

And they fought in all of the major engagements in the East with the army of the Potomac, starting with the first battle of Bull Run, which is considered one of the sort of opening fights where the Union Army lost.

And all of a sudden, President Lincoln and his cabinet realized this would not gonna be a quick war.

So the Fifth Maine stayed on, and they fought at other important battles to the Battle of Antietam.

They fought at the Battle of Gettysburg, but for the Fifth Maine, there were two battles that were particularly important.

One of those was the Battle of Rappahannock Station, which was in November of 1863.

And the reason this was so important was that the Fifth Maine captured in a nighttime charge four Confederate flags, which was an astounding number.

And in the Civil War, for a unit to lose a flag was the most disgraceful thing that could possibly happen.

So for the Fifth Maine to capture four flags in one battle was quite an accomplishment.

The Fifth Maine followed that up almost six months later at the Battle of Spotsylvania Courthouse and captured fifth Confederate flag.

So this, these were considered real trophies for the regiment.

- They were referred to widely as the Fighting Fifth.

And that's because they saw so much active battle.

They saw hard action, and it was traumatizing to say the least.

They may not have described it as traumatic, but if you listen to the soldier stories, they really liked to get together with each other here because they knew what they had gone through together.

And other people may not understand, but their fellow soldiers or fellow, they call them comrades, their fellow comrades would understand.

So it was a very special place for them to gather and reminisce.

(peaceful music) So the Civil War ended in 1865.

This building was built in 1888.

So some people come and they think this was a Civil War site.

It's not a Civil War site.

It's a historic site associated with the Civil War, because it was built well after.

The veterans of that regimen, many of them went on to have, you know really well, you know, successful careers as business people.

And some of them had gone to Boden and they were from family of means.

Others were very modest shoemakers mill workers, farmers.

It was a nice mix, demographic mix in, but some of them were clearly successful business people.

And they wanted a comfortable place to stay with their families for their reunions, which were very, very important to the men.

So this was the place that they came, and it was very dear to their hearts.

And they would talk about the names in the windows, and they would reminisce about the men that had not made it through the war or died after the war.

So it was a very sentimental place for them.

It was a very nostalgic place.

It was also a very healing place for these men.

- These were not career soldiers, these were people who were shooting at other people for the first time in their life.

So even if you win a battle, if you've just murdered somebody on the other side of the battlefield, this can haunt you for the rest of your life, watching somebody die at your own hands.

So a lot of these men felt these conflicting feelings and were not really encouraged to discuss them.

So a building like the Fifth Maine Memorial Hall, which was open to the members, surviving members of this unit, created a safe space for them to talk about their wartime experiences.

It offered a sort of therapeutic setting, and if we think about how these men fought in all of the same battles as one another, they could give subtle clues to start those conversations.

Such as, do you remember that nighttime charge we had on this specific day?

Everybody in that room remembers that particular battle.

It's a little different than a modern Veterans Association where you have people from multiple wars or from different theaters whose experiences could have been very different from one another.

For these men, the experience was analogous, and so being around those people allowed you an opportunity to talk about things with whom you couldn't really have that conversation otherwise.

It's about comradery, right?

So it's about being with people who went through an experience that was the most formative of their lives, you know, and it, and some of it was celebratory.

It was not just remembering the sort of macabre dark details, they celebrated the victories that they had.

And in fact, in the early reunions with these veterans, they reenacted camp life.

So they would do things like camp around in tents, and they would eat army food like hard tack.

But as their wives and children got involved in these places, they realized we could have this be more fun.

So the Fifth Maine veterans would boil lobsters while they were there.

They would eat ice cream, they would have potato sack races.

So there were parts of it that were reenacting the war, but parts of it were just fun.

It was an excuse to get together with people that you had this common bond with.

And every year you'd see them every summer and you'd do these fun things at the same time that you would grapple with issues that you were dealing with.

These places tell a story about American history that's not in the textbooks.

And so for me, these places are a way for people to engage with history that is not written down.

It's a way for people to understand the way the country dealt with the war afterwards, the types of traumas they faced, national issues about the memory of the war.

So a place like this, I think is able to tell stories and engage people in ways that other forms of history aren't.

So children that come into the museum engage with these artifacts and materials and they come away understanding the place of the Civil War in American history.

That's different than a monument is in a public square or something like that.

So it's a way of sort of connecting the past in the present, and that the physical space allows you to do that because the building is a museum in the sense that we have collections, but the building itself is an artifact at the same time.

- If you don't understand your past, you do not understand your present.

And I think it's so important for people to learn from the past, and this is just one piece of the past, but it does help us understand the Civil War a little bit better and the disunity a little bit better, which is very relevant today.

Historic sites like the Fifth Maine Museum contribute to that general understanding of why we are who we are and if you don't understand what came before you, I think it's really challenging to understand why we are where we are at the moment.

(peaceful music)