History detective uncovers stories of Arlington Heights’ forgotten Civil War soldiers

Brian Maloney remembers taking family road trips to Gettysburg and Fort Sumter and other historical sites, but never realized his distant hometown of Arlington Heights could have anything to do with the Civil War.

Two years ago he read a story in the Daily Herald about a woman in Switzerland doing genealogical research who discovered her distant relative was a Union Army dispatch rider killed in the Civil War. He hailed from Arlington Heights.

“That really kind of piqued my interest,” Maloney, 26, said of the story of John Sieburg. “When I read it, I had felt an abstract connection to (him). He was 21 when he died. I was 24 when I read that. So we were of a similar age. We were both from Arlington Heights. And so I started to picture him as if he were a classmate or a friend’s brother or somebody I maybe went to school with who was a little bit younger.”

“If this was somebody I knew, I would hope that I would do everything in my power to make sure that they were recognized.”

Already writing articles for the Arlington Heights Historical Society and Museum’s newsletter, the history buff decided to embark on a project to find the names and learn the stories of all Arlington Heights residents who fought in the Civil War.

Scouring newspaper archives, databases, genealogical volumes, census records and other documents, Maloney has identified 51 soldiers who participated in the war and lived within the vicinity of what became Arlington Heights.

His project scope encompasses the Town of Dunton — what was later incorporated as Arlington Heights — but also what early maps refer to as West Wheeling, farmland where residents likely identified with the town proper, Maloney suggests.

Of the 51 soldiers, 10 died in the war, including John Sieburg.

But the others — James Bachelder, John Bachelder, Dennison Billings, Leonard Doten, Edward C. Field, Henry S. Kingsley, Henry G. Meacham, Theodore E. Peck and Frederick T. Tilley — hadn’t yet gotten their due.

Come Monday, they will, when their names will be read aloud for the first time during Arlington Heights’ annual Memorial Day ceremony.

Maloney sent a copy of his compelling 51-page manuscript, “The Fallen Heroes of Arlington Heights in the Civil War,” to Veterans Memorial Committee of Arlington Heights Chairman Greg Padovani, who subsequently updated the list of the village’s fallen heroes that now totals 68.

Padovani is assembling wreaths for the nine, and Maloney helped place commemorative bricks engraved with their names, branches, ranks, regiments and dates of death at the foot of eternal flame sculpture in the town’s Memorial Park. It’s where the annual ceremony begins at 11 a.m. Monday, at the conclusion of the 106th parade that steps off from village hall at 9:30 a.m.

Maloney, an English as a Second Language and literacy adviser at the Arlington Heights Memorial Library, had been working on the history project in his free time for the past two years, but decided to “light a fire under myself” to have it done for this Memorial Day.

That meant long hours searching through 1860s census records and old newspapers to find names of Arlington Heights soldiers honored at early Decoration Day ceremonies a century ago. He then cross-referenced the names with databases — many now available online — like the Illinois Muster and Descriptive Rolls and the National Park Service’s Soldiers and Sailors Database.

Friends and family call Maloney a history detective; he tries to shed that title, likening himself to more of an amateur historian.

“I wouldn’t consider myself an expert. I’m just very determined to find things,” he said. “It’s like a puzzle. I want to fill in the blanks, and I’ll do whatever it takes to find the evidence to fill in the details in the story.”

Which stories captivated him the most?

He says he felt the strongest connection to Field, an Army private who rode on horseback leading big cannons into the field of battle. He experienced grueling conditions, Maloney said, from the frigid Battle of Stones River in Tennessee to sweltering conditions in the Atlanta campaign. Field’s grandfather was Frederick Miner, one of the earliest residents of Dunton.

“When I take my breaks at the library, I walk by the bricks in Memorial Park, and then on my walk back, I pass by the property where I’m pretty confident he lived. He was one of my first finds,” Maloney said. “He was in the war for a long time.”

Of the fallen soldiers he researched, only one of them has a gravesite in Arlington Heights. Doten, a corporal who fought at Gettysburg and Antietam, is interred at Wheeling Township Arlington Heights Cemetery.

“Everybody should make a pilgrimage here and leave a flower,” Maloney said. “I mean, this is somebody who has been connected to the most important events in American history. And until this project, I don’t think anybody knows anything about him.”

“The more I know about these soldiers,” he added, “the more I want to know.”