sination of President Abraham Lincoln, the 28th Pennsylvania also served with the U.S. Department of Washington during the early days of the imprisonment and trial of the Lincoln assassination conspirators (May 1865).
Sometime during this phase of service, Private Orlando Fuller developed rheumatic heart disease; he was subsequently mustered out with his regiment at Alexandria, Virginia on 18 July 1865.
Return to Civilian Life
Following his second honorable discharge from the military, Orlando Fuller returned home to the Lehigh Valley for what he likely thought would be the remainder of his life. By 1870, still unmarried, he was employed as a laborer and living with the family of John Gohring, a retired grocer who resided in South Bethlehem, Northampton County, Pennsylvania.
Additional sources document that, during the 1870s, Orlando Fuller was employed with the McKee & Fuller Car Wheel Works, the family firm founded by his nephew, James W. Fuller, Jr. Unfortunately, according to the 22 April 1876 edition of The Carbon Advocate, he suffered a serious injury while on the job:
Mr. Orlando Fuller, an employee at the Car Wheel Works of McKee & Fuller, at Ferndale, had his left foot badly hurt one day last week by being struck thereon by a falling car wheel.
By 1895, Orlando Fuller was a resident of Wescosville, according to November 1895 editions of The Allentown Leader and The Allentown Democrat, which also announced that he had recently been awarded his original pension for service during the Civil War. The amount initially granted – $6.00 monthly – steadily increased over the years until reaching a rate of $12.00 per month, and was awarded due to his “Inability to earn a support by Manual labor,” according to an entry in the admissions ledger for the Central Branch of the U.S. National Home for Disabled Volunteer Soldiers at Dayton, Montgomery County, Ohio (where he was admitted on 7 November 1895).
This 1895 ledger entry also described him as an unmarried Protestant, former laborer, aged 69, who was 5’9” tall with a dark complexion, gray hair and gray eyes, who was able to read and write. Although his residence subsequent to discharge in the Dayton Soldiers’ Home admissions ledger was shown as Wescosville, it is clear from U.S. Census records of the time, that Orlando Fuller had opted to resettle in Montgomery County to be closer to the federal government’s medical care he was able to receive as a former Civil War soldier. Like many of the 47th Pennsylvania Volunteers, Orlando Fuller suffered not only from the heart disease which prompted his discharge from the 47th Pennsylvania in September 1864 and from the 28th Pennsylvania in 1865, but from chronic bronchitis, first contracted due to the often damp and harsh conditions experienced during the early years of the Rebellion.
At the dawn of the new century, federal census records indicated that he was still residing at the Dayton National Soldiers’ Home as of 1900. Just four years later, on 22 December 1904, Orlando Fuller was gone. His death notice in the 29 December 1904 of the Dayton Daily Journal provided the following details:
FULLER – At the Central branch, National Military Home for D.V.S., December 22, 1904, Orlando Fuller, late of Co. D, 28th Pennsylvania Infantry aged 78. Cause of death, chronic bronchitis, with senectus [old age].
His net worth was appraised by the Dayton National Soldiers’ Home as $341.40, $335 of which was yet to be drawn from his pension, the remaining $6.40 being “found on person.” The next of kin listed on the Dayton Soldiers’ Home admissions ledger was his nephew and former employer, James W. Fuller, Jr. of Catasauqua, Pennsylvania.
A death entry in that same soldiers’ home admissions ledger indicated that Private Orlando Fuller was interred at the Dayton National Cemetery in Dayton, Montgomery County, Ohio in Section N, Row 12, Grave 17.
1. Allentown’s First Undertaker Dead, in Town and Country Newspaper. Pennsburg, Pennsylvania: 16 January 1904.
2. Bates, Samuel P. History of Pennsylvania Volunteers, 1861-5, Vol. I. Harrisburg, Pennsylv