Edwin Swain Heath was born in 1843 at Mendon, New York, the son of Elander Heath & Sophia Moore. Mendon was a small rural community situated between Le Roy and Rochester near the city of Rochester, in Monroe County, New York. The Mendon community was named after Mendon, Massachusetts, once a small Quaker settlement known for its cobblestone houses and was a rural farming community which contributed many of its native sons to the fighting. Edwin S. Heath, was among them. Out of a total population of 100,648 in 1860, Monroe County sent 10,372 soldiers into the Union ranks. Most of them fought with the Army of the Potomac, which fought against Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia. Some of the bloodiest fighting of the war occurred between those two armies, especially along the Rappahannock and Rapidan Rivers, roughly halfway between the rival national capitals of Washington, D.C., and Richmond, Virginia.

Edwin enlisted on February 1, 1862, at Le Roy, N.Y when he was only 19 years old, described later in documents of the 105th New York Infantry as being 5 feet 5 inches tall  with hazel eyes and dark features, and was mustered into Company E. The regiment he joined, the 105th, also known as the LeRoy and Irish Regiment, was particularly interesting because it was a hybrid; a consolidation of two separate recruiting efforts. The soldiers who enlisted at Le Roy were being organized by the Rev. James. M. Fuller, presiding elder of the Methodist Episcopal Church. When recruitment lagged, however, state authorities ordered three companies of Irishmen from Rochester, who were hoping to form their own regiment, to unite with Fuller’s men to form the 105th; organized at Leroy, New York on March 28, 1862. It left New York for Washington, D.C. on April 4, 1862, attached to Duryea's Brigade, Military District of Washington.

The 105th saw its first action at the second battle of Bull Run, on August 30, 1862, suffering 74 casualties. At Antietam the following month, it was part of the first brigade of Union troops to charge into the infamous Cornfield, suffering another 74 casualties and after another 78 casualties at Fredericksburg, the regiment was so decimated it was disbanded, its soldiers being consolidated into the 94th New York Volunteer Infantry Regiment, on March 10, 1863. The 94th was also known as the "Belle Jefferson Rifles". Edwin, who had been transferred to Company F of the 94th, when his term ran out, re-enlisted as a Veteran Volunteer on February 14, 1864 at Camp Parole, at Annapolis, Maryland, into that company and records reveal Heath received a promotion to the rank of Corporal on September 1, 1864.

On December 13, 1862, Union soldiers of the 105th New York Volunteer Infantry, Private Edwin S. Heath’s regiment, fixed bayonets and charged straight ahead over a plowed field toward Confederate positions south of Fredericksburg, Virginia. They were in the front line of Col. Adrian Root’s brigade, part of a two-division assault on Stonewall Jackson’s right wing of Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia. The fire of the Confederate troops who were dug in behind a railroad line and on the hills behind, was “incessant and galling,” Root reported. So much so that the soldiers in Root’s front line instinctively slowed down their forward momentum to return fire. Officers urged the men onward, to the brink of a hill beyond which lay the Rebel lines and the Union soldiers swept down on the Confederates; taking 200 prisoners and putting the rest to flight into the woods nearby.

Unfortunately, on a day when nothing went right for the Union Army of the Potomac, the assault was all for nothing. As the Confederates rallied, and then began counterattacking, Root rode off seeking support; but there was none to be had. Two Union divisions had penetrated the Confederate lines, but were forced to withdraw because the Union commander on that part of the field hesitated committing any more of his troops to battle. Farther north, at Fredericksburg itself, the futility was compounded when waves of Union soldiers were flung against Marye’s Heights, only to be mowed down by Confederate infantrymen packed four deep behind an impregnable stone wall, and by artillery ringing the heights. The debacle at Fredericksburg was one of the worst Union defeats of the American Civil War. Edwin Heath was one of 12,600 Union casualties that day within days he was reported to be recuperating at Columbia Hospital in Washington, D.C. It seemed the darkest hour of the war and yet within seven months the war would turn in the North’s favor with two dramatic victories; at Gettysburg and Vicksburg.

The 94th, which had been organized in Sackett’s Harbor in northern New York and mustered in on March 10, 1862, was subsequently engaged in some of the heaviest fighting of the war. It suffered a staggering 245 casualties with many of them being captured during the first day of fighting at Gettysburg, on July 1, 1863, when the Union position was overrun on Oak Ridge near the Mummasburg Road. It suffered another 178 casualties, again many of them being captured, when Confederate troops flanked and surrounded a Union lodgment on the Weldon Railroad just south of Petersburg; in August 1864. We know Edwin did not participate in many battle with the 94th, but he was engaged in the Battle of Hatcher’s Run on February 5th through the 7th in 1865, during the Richmond-Peterson Campaign, and known as the Battle of Boydton Plank Road, with it. It was during the siege of Petersburg when Union General Ulysses S. Grant attempted to outflank the Confederate defenses and seize a critical railroad supplying Lee’s army. The Union forces were met near Dabney's Mill by a Confederate division, but the Union held fast and the Confederates fell back. Then another Southern division arrived and counterattacked. That time the Union fell back, were routed, and ran in disorder until reinforcements came up and stopped the Confederate advance in the last fighting of the day. There was skirmishing the next day as Grant strengthened his line, which then extended all the way to Hatcher's Run. Of the 35,000 Union soldiers engaged, 1,512 became casualties, while about half that many were lost among the 14,000 Confederates. According to Edwin’s own service record in the New York Adjutant General’s annual report, he was severely wounded by rifle balls in both his right hip and leg during that action at Dabney’s Mills. The injury Heath received there would prove to cause him anguish throughout his life. Muster Rolls listed him present in the hospital at Philadelphia, Pennsylvania as late as July 18, 1865, but according to a Report of the Adjutant General in New York, he was actually mustered out at Washington, D.C. on July 18, 1865. One explanation would be that when his unit was mustered out at Washington, he to was mustered out, though he physically remained in a hospital at Philadelphia.

Heath had become a farmer and resident back in Allegan, Michigan by 1867, where he had family living; his brothers John M. and Martin V. Heath. His first wife, Mary Ann Gage died in 1867 and he later, in 1870, married Louemma Keth at Titusville, Pennsylvania. The family was still residing in Titusville when his and Louemma’s fourth child, Mary Jane, was born in 1881. The family arrived in Victoria, Australia in 1885 and their fifth child, Della Victoria, was born on September 4, 1886; named after the state in which they lived. Suffering for many years with the wounds he had received at Dabney’s Mill, Heath applied for an invalid pension in 1866 and was awarded $6 a month until his death at age 52; on November 14, 1895. Heath had been employed as a caretaker for ten years when he died, of blood poisoning and asthma, at the Dunolly Hospital. He was survived by his wife and six children; three under the age of 16, Pearl having been born only eighteen months earlier.   Louemma survived Edwin by forty years, dieing in 1935.

Edwin Swain Heath was buried in the Eddington Cemetery in the Church of England Section near his home of Laaencoorie, Victoria, Australia. Louemma was later buried in the Melbourne General Cemetery in the Baptist Section.   Having no headstone or marker, a bronze memorial plaque was offered by a member of the American Civil War Round Table of Queensland, Inc., to be cast and shipped at no cost to be placed on his grave, but it was declined by the cemetery.

Birth, Marriage and Death Records, Melbourne, Victoria

Bob Marcotte, researcher, Rochester, New York

Eddington Cemetery Records

Michigan State Archives, Lansing, Michigan

New York State Archives, Albany, New York

Report of the Adjutant-General, New York:

Regimental Histories, 94th & 105th New York Infantry

“Supplement to the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies”, Gary W. Gallagher

U.S. Army Personnel Records, National Archives, Washington, D.C