Robert Farrell of Huntington completes 20-year quest to catalog Civil War soldiers, sailors with Long Island connection

Confederate soldiers, brothers fighting on opposing sides and more than 100 veterans buried in Australia — these are just a few of the surprises uncovered by Robert Farrell, a retired aerospace manager who has spent the past 20 years trying to track down every Civil War soldier and sailor with a Long Island connection.

To date, the list compiled by Farrell, 89, includes the names of 6,139 men who were from Long Island, lived here after the war or were buried on the Island. And while it’s possible a few more may come to light in the future, Farrell said the project is finally done.

“I had no idea it would take that long,” said Farrell, who started the project by researching veterans from his hometown of Huntington, then expanded it first to all of Suffolk County and then to Nassau. “Every time I finished a version, all of a sudden I’d have an idea to look someplace else, and then I’d have another 120 names.”

His labor of love has significantly added to the historical record, proving invaluable to fellow researchers, experts in the field agree.

“Bob Farrell’s work is a boon to Long Island genealogists,” said Jim Gandy, the librarian/archivist for the New York State Military Museum and Veterans Research Center in Saratoga Springs. “His painstaking attention to detail will greatly aid anyone researching Civil War soldiers from Suffolk or Nassau counties. ... We constantly use his spreadsheet when we answer research inquiries.” (The full list can be found on the museum’s website by choosing the “Scanned Images” tab.)

GENEALOGY AND GETTYSBURG

Farrell had been retired eight years, after working for 26 years as a Grumman subcontract manager, when he embarked on the project.

“When I retired in the late ‘90s,” Farrell said, “I did all the things that people usually do when they first retire. I did house repairs and had a three-season room added to the back of my house.”

He volunteered at the Cradle of Aviation Museum in Uniondale and coached at the South Huntington Sports Club. “I was doing my family genealogy. But I got bored.”

So in 2004, two years after joining the North Shore Civil War Roundtable — which hosts speakers and tours battlefields — he decided to combine his interests in genealogy and the war by researching all of the veterans of the conflict who had lived in Huntington and Babylon.

Farrell said he was inspired in part by visits to Gettysburg with his son, who attended the nearby Mount St. Mary’s University, and a roundtable lecture by James E. Haas, author of “This Gunner at His Piece,” about Civil War soldiers from College Point, Queens.

That first list grew to 1,500 names of people from Huntington and what is now Babylon, which was part of Huntington until 1873, he said. He later compiled this research into a now out-of-print, 67-page, self-published 2007 book titled “Our Veterans Brave and Noble.”

But Farrell wasn’t done. With the initial project completed, he decided to broaden his search to all of Suffolk County.

During his initial research, Farrell said he had come across many veterans who lived elsewhere in Suffolk. So, he said, “I continued to just make a list of them. I came up with almost 3,500 people” by the time he was done in 2015.

Having come that far, Farrell decided to add Nassau County veterans to his list. Over the course of the project, he said he devoted about 20 hours a week to research. Most of the time he worked in his office, which is overflowing with files and books, on the second floor of the home he shares with his wife of 62 years, Barbara.

His detective work relied on post-Civil War books, websites such as findagrave.com and data sheets from state archives. “In the beginning, people from the roundtable would go to cemeteries and provide me with lists, and I had a retired cop who used to do some work for me doing internet research,” he said.

CONFEDERATE TROOPS, TOO

Of the 6,139 veterans he identified, Farrell said that 4,722 served with New York State volunteer regiments. Another 95 were in the small standing U.S. Army or special sharpshooter regiments. There were 497 veterans who served in other states, as far away as Nebraska.

He found 204 Black soldiers who served in the Army and 77 who served in the Navy.

Farrell said he identified 735 men who were killed or missing in action and 581 wounded. There were 255 captured by Confederate troops, and 124 buried as unknowns on the battlefield.

And his research turned up some surprises: Seven Long Islanders who fought for the Confederacy and others who were buried as far away as Australia.

“Finding people in foreign countries was a surprise,” he said. “I found 137 veterans buried in Australia and three in New Zealand.” Other veterans were interred in England and Norway. The rest were buried in 38 states plus the District of Columbia, he said.

There was Lt. Col. Ole P. H. Balling of Middle Island, who in November 1861 took command of the 145th New York Infantry. In 1863, he was shot accidentally by a Union soldier and discharged. After the war, he painted highly regarded portraits of prominent Americans, including presidents Chester Arthur and James Garfield, before he left for Norway in 1874 to operate a painters’ workshop. He died there in 1906.

Among the Confederate soldiers, who Farrell surmised were in the South when the war broke out and remained there to enlist, was William Dix of Sag Harbor, who was a corporal with the 5th North Carolina Infantry Regiment. In a war that divided many families, his brother, John L., fought for the opposing side as a private in the 6th New York Cavalry, Farrell said.

BLACK AND NATIVE AMERICAN SOLDIERS

In his research, Farrell said he found hundreds of Black and Native American soldiers who served in the United States Colored Troops, segregated regiments formed after the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863 that were led by white officers. He also located sailors who served in the integrated Navy, he said.

One of the most well-known Black soldiers from Long Island is Samuel Ballton, a private in the 5th Massachusetts Cavalry. Ballton settled in Greenlawn in 1873, where he earned the moniker the Pickle King when he grew a record 1.5 million cucumbers for pickling in one harvest.

Farrell’s list also includes Native Americans: Shinnecocks Warren and Stephen Cuffee, Montaukett Stephen Pharaoh and Unkechaug Edward Edwards.

A FAVORITE UNION OFFICER

His favorite Long Islander in the war is Frederick W. Mather, who served in the 7th New York Heavy Artillery Regiment before becoming an officer with the 24th United States Colored Troops. In June 1864, Mather was captured at Petersburg in Virginia and his sword was kept by Confederate Capt. Wilson H. Brewster. The Union officer was paroled in March 1865 and promoted to captain, major and then colonel of the 24th United States Colored Troops.

After Brewster died in 1890, Mather wrote a letter of condolence to his widow, Farrell said. She returned the weapon, saying, “I never wanted that Yankee sword in my home.”

Mather went on to become the first superintendent of the Cold Spring Harbor Fish Hatchery and introduced brown trout to American fishing streams.

Another prominent local on Farrell’s list is George Washington Brush, of Huntington, who enlisted as a corporal in the 48th New York Infantry and was promoted to sergeant. He later became a captain with the 34th United States Colored Troops in the Southeast. He was awarded the Medal of Honor for commanding a boat crew that saved Union soldiers on a stranded steamer that was exposed to heavy Confederate artillery fire in 1864.

Then there is Philippe R. de Trobriand, the only French general in the war. He lived in Bayport afterward and is buried in the cemetery of St. Ann’s Episcopal Church in Sayville.

The youngest veteran that Farrell found was Jimmy J. Byrnes, who he believes may have lived in Lloyd Neck after coming to America from Ireland in 1854. He served as a volunteer musician with the 155th New York Infantry until he turned 16 and was made a private.

Civil War historian Harrison Hunt, a former supervisor with the Nassau County museum system who for more than three decades has studied and written about the war as it relates to Long Island — and is co-author of “Long Island and the Civil War” (History Press 2015) — said, “Robert Farrell’s list is a remarkable achievement. . . . His project not only documents more than 6,000 Civil War veterans in Suffolk and Nassau counties, but reflects the postwar growth of Long Island as well. Queens, Nassau and Suffolk provided about 3,000 soldiers and sailors during the war; the rest of the men Farrell has chronicled came to what’s now suburban Long Island in the decades afterward.”

HONORING ‘THE ORDINARY SOLDIER’

While many Civil War buffs concentrate on the battles that took place from 1861 to 1865, Farrell, who writes poetry about the human toll of the war, said his focus is on the soldiers.

“I’m interested in the people who did the fighting and what they gave to society,” he said. “I want to honor the ordinary soldier because I was one myself.”

From 1955 to 1957, Farrell served as an Army private first-class with an anti-aircraft battery at Fort Wadsworth on Staten Island.

His research has produced tangible results. After he identified six members of the Revenue Marine, a precursor to the U.S. Coast Guard, buried in Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn, Farrell said the cemetery obtained headstones for them.

Now that his Civil War list has been essentially completed, Farrell, who is chairman of the Huntington Historical Society’s Genealogy Workshop, said, “I’m going to take it easy. I’m working on my family genealogy. I’ve gotten back as far as 1800” tracking down ancestors from Ireland.

But he acknowledged his spreadsheet of Long Island Civil War soldiers and sailors may not be complete. “There’ll be a few dribbling in,” he predicted. “But I think I’ve already added something to history.”