Woburn Post 161 G.A.R. (Grand Army of the Republic) was instituted in Fraternity Hall, Woburn on January 23, 1884 with 45 members. The first Commander of the Post was George Perkins. This G.A.R. Post included both Woburn natives and veterans born elsewhere who settled in Woburn later in life. Post 161 continued in operation through 1929 by which time most of Woburn's Civil War veterans had passed away.
This large framed group of carte-de-visite portraits, dating to around 1890, consists of 96 individual portraits of veterans from Post 161 who served during the Civil War period. The majority of Woburn men served in the 5th Massachusetts Regiment, Company G (Woburn Mechanic Phalanx), the 22nd Massachusetts Regiment, Company F (Woburn Union Guard), or the 39th Regiment, Company K (Woburn National Rangers), although Woburn men who enlisted elsewhere also served in other Union regiments. The membership of Post 161 included veterans who enlisted in Woburn and elsewhere in Massachusetts, along with veterans from the states of Maine, New Hampshire, New York and Rhode Island who served in their state's regiments.
The portraits were conserved and digitized by the Northeast Document Conservation Center (NEDCC) through a Preservation Grant awarded to the Woburn Public Library by the Massachusetts Civil War Sesquicentennial Commission in 2014. The service record and biographical history of each veteran was gathered through research in several sources including Massachusetts Soldiers, Sailors, and Marines in the Civil War, the Woburn Men in Revolution, Civil and Spanish American Wars Collection (MIL-C/-5) and Historical Data Systems' online database U.S., Civil War Soldier Records and Profiles, 1861-1865, accessed through Ancestry.com.
