er’s illness:
After Mr. Fuller’s death William H. Glace, Esq., his friend for fifty years and his companion in sickness in the garret of a Virginia farm shack during the winter of 1863-1864, paid him a beautiful tribute. Mr. Glace wrote:–
‘Owing to the forethought of his uncle, Lieut. George W. Fuller, a victim of the same war, two young girls, daughters of the owner, Mr. Wren, attended us through that long siege of sickness where he lay nigh to death many weeks. After a tedious convalescence, he recovered only in a measure and was honorably discharged, whilst I recovered to serve the full period of three years.
‘In 1891 he said to me, ‘I wonder what became of the Wren girls; let us go down and see.’ We went to Washington and drove up along the Potomac to the Chain Bridge; thence over into Fairfax County, Virginia, and as we came near the place we could not fix our surroundings, as large trees had grown where there had been farm land, and we stopped at a farm house, when a man over thirty-five years of age, a Mr. Catlin, came out, and we inquired if that house on the hill was the Wren house and whether the 47th Pennsylvania Regiment and 7th Maine Regiment had encamped on yonder slope the first Winter of the war. ‘Oh, yes,’ he replied. ‘I heard my father say that the regiments lay there and lost 200 men that first Winter. Anyhow, the Wrens live there.’ I shall never forget as he turned to me and said, ‘How strange; did you hear him say, ‘My father told me?’ We forget a generation had grown up since that time.’ As we entered the house, the first object that attracted his attention was Lieut. George W. Fuller’s photograph in full uniform on the mantel.
‘We had dinner, after which we gave each of the two women a bank bag of gold. A young son of one of them, when he heard the click of gold, exclaimed, ‘Now I can go to Washington and learn to be an architect.’
However, that article was derived almost entirely from the Lambert-Reinhard book and the dates presented both in the book and in the retelling of that account by The Allentown Leader were wrong (1863-1864 instead of 1861-1862 when the 47th was stationed in Virginia). Furthermore, members of the 47th Pennsylvania generally were not treated for their illnesses in the homes of civilians, but in camp. When deemed seriously ill, they were confined to the post hospital associated with their respective duty stations. When wounds or illnesses were deemed beyond the capacity of these facilities, soldiers were moved on to the Union Army’s larger general hospital system where they could receive more advanced care.
In addition, several of the biographical sketches in the Lambert-Reinhard book also contain other factual errors. (The sketch for James W. Fuller, among its mistakes, lists the company he initially served with in the 47th Pennsylvania Volunteers as Company I, rather than Company F.) Even more puzzling, while the Lambert-Reinhard book and Fuller’s military records indicate that J. W. Fuller, Jr. was 18 at the time of his enlistment (making his birth year 1843, a fact which seems to be confirmed by his gravestone), Fuller’s own passport application – completed in his own hand – stated that he was born in 1845 (meaning he was just 16 at the time of his enlistment).
The timing and subsequent short duration of his promotion, combined with the confusion surrounding his birth year, may signal that James W. Fuller, Jr. was actually under age at the time of his enlistment and may have been removed from harm’s way by his superiors once they discovered he was not the 18-year-old he had claimed to be at enlistment, or at the request of his father, James W. Fuller, Sr., who was a close friend of Pennsylvania’s Governor.
Regardless of the cause of his honorable discharge, James W. Fuller, Jr. most definitely did serve with the 47th Pennsylvania Volunteer Infantry during the early days of the Civil War. On October 11, his regiment marched in the Grand Review at Bailey’s Cross Roads after having been ordered with the 3rd Brigade to Camp Griffin. In mid-October, he may have served on pick