Our object in giving to the public a full, true, and concise history of
Company A, 50th Regiment National Guard, State of New York, better known
to the citizens of Ithaca as the DeWitt Guard, is to show as honorable a
record as can be produced by any similar organization--so far as the
membership of this Company was connected with the army and navy of the
United States during the late rebellion. We shall show that the total
membership of the Company from the time of its organization, in
December, 1851, to the present time, has been two hundred and two, of
which eighty-two served either in the army or navy during the war
against eighty-eight who did not; twenty-nine names appear on the
Company roll, of whom it is not known to the writer whether they were or
were not in the army, and nine who died previous to the war. We have
undertaken a brief personal history to each, which we believe will be
interesting to the reader.
We also wish to show that the Company has been, from the time of its
organization to the present, a self-supporting and self-sustaining
institution, until recently receiving nothing from the State but arms,
and that the individual members have contributed the sum of two thousand
seven hundred and twenty dollars and fifty-six cents, to which amount
should be added a liberal percentage for disbursements which do not
appear on Company records.
We propose to give the name of each member of the DeWitt Guard from its
organization, the date of his enlistment, his profession, with such
incidents as we think will be of interest to the reader, after which we
shall give the history of the Company collectively. There may be those
who have belonged to the Company whose names will not appear in these
pages. This must be attributed to the fact of their not signing the
muster-roll of the Company, as every name there recorded is introduced
in the following history.