Quoted by special permission from Scott L. Mingus, in "Human Interest Stories of the Gettysburg Campaign" (Ortanna, PA: Colecraft, 2007).

Lt. Thomas Jefferson Spurr of the 15th Massachusetts had been badly wounded in the thigh during the savage fighting in the West Woods on the 17th. Like the majority of the immobile Union wounded, he had been left behind when Sedgwick’s division of the II Corps had retreated. Weakened by blood loss and shock, the pre-war lawyer had suffered alone in agony throughout the long night. The area where he lay was now occupied by Confederates. An officer of a South Carolina regiment happened by the stricken Spurr on Thursday and recognized him as an old college pal from their days at Harvard. They had not seen each other in the four years since they graduated. The bonds of past personal friendship easily overcame the differing colors of their uniforms, and the Rebel compassionately knelt beside his old friend and ministered to him. He shouldered the wounded New Englander and carried him to a nearby farm yard pressed into service as a Confederate field hospital.

The 24-year-old Spurr was placed near a couple of haystacks and covered with a blanket. For two days, he stayed put as doctors stabilized him enough to prepare him for transport to a hospital in Hagerstown . He lived long enough for his mother Mary to travel from Massachusetts to visit him one last time before he passed away a few days later on September 27. He was only one of forty-three injured men of his regiment and its attached sharpshooter company who died before Christmas from their wounds. Another seventy-four had died on the battlefield, marking the 15th Massachusetts as one of the most devastated regiments in the Federal army at Antietam.