Nancy and George Hoover looked on helplessly as rebels traipsed through their modest Pennsylvania farm following the Battle of Gettysburg. The Confederates, disappointed yet still defiant, camped in the fields around the Hoover homestead near Waynesboro, Pa., about 20 miles west of Gettysburg.
On Monday, July 6, 1863, a group of enemy officers entered the Hoover house and made themselves comfortable. Mrs. Hoover later told a local historian that they “were seated at Mr. Hoover’s table partaking of his hospitality, and discussing the great battle and pointing out the causes of their defeat and mistakes they made.”
At one point during the dialogue, Lt. Ransom W. Wood of the 20th Georgia Infantry reached into his coat and pulled out a Bible. He had picked the Testament from the pocket of a dead Yankee captain during the battle.
About this time on another small farm about 250 miles away in New York, John Nicoll learned that his eldest son, a Union army captain, had been killed at Gettysburg. Capt. Isaac Nicoll, 23, was a quintessential patriot. Born in New York City and raised 60 miles north in the Orange County village of Blooming Grove, N.Y., he had recruited a company of volunteers in the summer of 1862. The rank and file elected its officers, and voted Nicoll their captain and commander. The unit became Company G of a new regiment, the 124th New York Infantry.
The regiment headed off to war in September 1862. “On the eve of Captain Nicoll’s departure with his regiment,” his father recalled. “The ladies of this town presented him with a handsome sword. It was not a formal presentation, simply accompanied with a letter.”
The New Yorkers were attached to the Army of the Potomac, and eventually assigned to the Third Corps. They had their baptism under fire during the disastrous attacks at Fredericksburg in December 1862. Five months later, the 124th suffered heavy casualties in the crushing Union defeat at Chancellorsville, with Nicoll’s company hit hard: one third of his men, 22 of 60, were listed as casualties. Nicoll happened to be away on a 10-day furlough, however, and missed the battle. His first lieutenant had led the company into action.
At Chancellorsville, the regiment received the sobriquet “Orange Blossoms” from its colorful colonel, Augustus Van Horne Ellis, a former steamboat captain who had wandered off to California during the heady days of the Gold Rush. An Ellis subordinate, Capt. Charles H. Weygant, recounted the story in the regiment’s history years later. He wrote that the New Yorkers were in the thick of the battle when they encountered an officer from the staff of Third Corps commander, Maj. Gen. Daniel E. Sickles. The staffer attempted to rally the remnants of two or three broken regiments. “Seeing the 124th, this officer called on it, in the name of General Sickles, to retake the woods from which one of our batteries, having fired its last round of ammunition, had just been driven. Ellis, with no other reply than ‘Hi, Hi, my Orange Blossoms,’ gave the order.” The men promptly obeyed and took the position until overwhelmed by the enemy and forced to withdraw.
Two months later at Gettysburg, Gen. Sickles advanced the 124th and the rest of his Third Corps a half-mile ahead of their assigned position, creating a deadly gap between his forces and the main Union line. Alert Confederates promptly exploited Sickles’ blunder.
Meanwhile, Nicoll and his comrades occupied Houck’s Ridge, a rise of rock-strewn ground anchored on its southern end by a prominent outcropping of boulders known as Devil’s Den. “We had not yet learned by bitter experience the inestimable value of breastworks, and instead of spending our leisure time in rolling together the loose stones and throwing over them such a quantity of earth as would have formed a bullet proof line, we lounged about on the grass and rocks, quietly awaiting the coming shock, which many declared themselves ready and anxious to receive.” recorded Weygant. “But there were undoubtedly those among us who ardently wished and perhaps secretly prayed that when the battle opened, it might rage the most furiously along some other part of the line.”