Minnesota Civil War memorial in Gettysburg Cemetery stands apart

We don't know what he looked like, but we know he played checkers. And 17 days after the Civil War started, Pvt. Henry C. Winters left his family's farm southwest of Lake City and mustered in with the First Minnesota Infantry Regiment in Winona.

Nine months and several battles later, Winters shows up in fellow soldier Isaac Taylor's diary on Jan. 19, 1863: "Fine, pleasant day," Taylor wrote. "I finish reading the book of Joshua this evening & play a game of checkers with Henry C. Winters of Company K."

Less than six months later, Winters died on the battlefield in Gettysburg, Pa., during a pivotal Civil War clash that saw more than 50,000 men fall.

"He was just a young bachelor farmer, born in Germany in 1831, who volunteered to fight, along with so many immigrants, for their new country," said his great nephew, Charles "Pete" Winters, 80, a retired Air Force brigadier general and Rochester native who flew nearly 300 combat missions over Vietnam and now lives in Myrtle Beach, S.C.

Pete Winters will join a few dozen Minnesotans on Saturday near Henry's grave at Gettysburg National Cemetery. He'll deliver keynote remarks at a commemoration ceremony marking the 150th anniversary of the placement of a memorial marble urn at the cemetery's Minnesota section. It was the first memorial to dot the graveyard.

Back in the autumn of 1867, four years after the bloodbath, those from the First Minnesota who were still alive returned to Gettysburg.

"The surviving members of the 1st Minnesota, which made a gallant fight at Gettysburg, have prepared a headstone memorial tribute to their fallen comrades," according to an Oct. 16, 1867, article in the Gettysburg Star & Sentinel.

In a suicidal charge on July 2, 1863, the Minnesota soldiers rushed the Confederate line at Gettysburg to give Gen. Winfield Scott Hancock extra time for reinforcements to arrive.

"Five minutes must be gained or we were lost," Hancock later told a Minnesota senator. "It was fortunate that I found there so grand a body of men as the First Minnesota."

The general said it pained him to order the Minnesota troops to charge, "but I would have done it if I had known every man would be killed."

They nearly were. A staggering 82 percent of the advancing soldiers — 215 out of 262 — were killed or wounded. No other unit in the Union Army suffered a higher casualty rate in any single Civil War battle.

"I can't imagine the courage it took to charge into certain death," said Pete Winters, who has visited his great-uncle's grave amid the 52 buried in the Minnesota section at Gettysburg. "You get a feeling of reverence every time."

On a 2011 visit, they asked cemetery officials if they could sponsor the upkeep of the marble urn the Minnesota veterans dedicated 150 years ago this fall. "It wasn't being well-maintained," Diane said.

The urn was the first and only monument for a dozen years at the Gettysburg cemetery. Some fancier Minnesota monuments, erected years later, were covered financially. But the 1867 urn — etched with the words: "These Dead should not have died in vain" — could use a sponsor.

So the Sanneses stepped up. They not only pledged to pay for the urn's upkeep, they worked with Gettysburg gardener and battlefield volunteer Barb Adams to tend to the simple arrangement of flowers and vines just like those originally planted.

They borrowed the idea from 1867. According to a Harper's Weekly article, the Minnesota veterans who dedicated the urn also set up a fund — "the interest from which is used by a lady of Gettysburg in keeping bright and fresh the red, white, and blue flowers which bloom in the vase."

The magazine article even tipped the Sanneses to specific plants originally used: "The leaves of the crimson verbenas that have fallen on the white marble vase remind us of the red tide that stained the field."

"It's so poignant to stand there, knowing that the surviving members of the First Minnesota came back four years later with so much pride," said Tom Stack of Wilmington, Del., a great-great nephew of Pvt. Winters. He'll be back at the urn next weekend with the Minnesota contingent.

There's one more connection between the Minnesotans heading to Gettysburg and the battle that went down there. Among the more than 200 dead and wounded Minnesotans was a private named Marcus Past, who was shot through the chest and died a few days later. His brother, Edward Past, had been injured earlier at Antietam.

When Darryl and Diane Sannes purchased their Brooklyn Center home in 1992, Darryl scanned the thick abstract at the closing. Among the first names listed, from the property's early ownership in the 1850s, were the Past brothers — early settlers in what became Brooklyn Center.

Darryl had been reading books on the Civil War since grade school. "But when you buy a place once owned by two Civil War brothers," he said, "it really hits home."

Curt Brown's tales about Minnesota's history appear each Sunday. Send him ideas at mnhistory@startribune.com. A collection of his columns is available as the e-book "Frozen in History" at startribune.com/ebooks.