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A product of the local public schools, James W. Fuller, Jr. furthered his education by attending private schools in the Pennsylvania communities of Weaversville, Norristown and Kingston.
Civil War Military Service
James W. Fuller, Jr. enrolled for military service at Catasauqua in Lehigh County, Pennsylvania on 21 August 1861. He was awarded the rank of Sergeant with Company F of the 47th Pennsylvania Volunteers (the same company and regiment in which his uncles Orlando and George W. Fuller served), and mustered in at Camp Curtin in Harrisburg, Dauphin County on 30 August.
Following a brief training period in light infantry tactics, he was shipped by rail with his uncles and their fellow 47th Pennsylvanians to Washington, D.C. where, beginning 21 September, they were stationed roughly two miles from the White House at “Camp Kalorama” near Georgetown. Mustered into federal service with the U.S. Army on 24 September, they became part of Brigadier-General Isaac Stevens’ 3rd Brigade. Ordered to march out once again, they headed for Camp Lyon, Maryland on the Potomac River’s eastern shore before moving on toward Camp Advance. They pitched their tents in a deep ravine near Fort Ethan Allen and Union General W. F. Smith’s headquarters. As part of the massive Army of the Potomac, they were assigned to help to defend the nation’s capital.
On 1 October 1861, Sergeant James W. Fuller, Jr. was promoted from his service with F Company to the rank of 1st Lieutenant and Regimental Adjutant with the regiment’s central command staff, a position he held for just over three months. According to James Franklin Lambert and Henry J. Reinhard in their A History of Catasauqua in Lehigh County, Pennsylvania, James W. Fuller, Jr., “suffered a protracted illness, which overtook him during the first year of the Civil War in Virginia,” and “was honorably discharged from the army and returned to his home.”
An article, Big Achievements in the House of Fuller, which ran in the 27 June 1914 edition of The Allentown Leader seems to confirm Fuller’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