LOCKPORT – The great-great-grandson of an Akron native who joined a Civil War infantry regiment in Niagara County donated his ancestor’s complete collection of more than 180 wartime letters to the Niagara County Historian’s Office on Wednesday.

The letters by Simon Burdick Cummins, who was only 19 when he joined the Union Army in 1862, relate the horrors of battle and the tedium of camp life, as well as his devotion to duty and his support of President Abraham Lincoln.

“These letters we have from him are priceless and they always will be,” said Legislator W. Keith McNall. “I’m sure many of them will bring tears, but that’s what war is about.”

“When them infernal shells comes over us they make us hug the ground & and almost make a man’s heart sink within him,” Cummins wrote from Cedar Creek, Va., on Oct. 18, 1864. “If you could have just one come over you 25 thousand dollars would not induce you to enlist. I think I never will serve my time out. That is enough for me but I shall do my duty as long as I am a soldier & I am not one of these kind that swallows tobacco or makes myself sick so as to unfit myself for duty. No Sir.”

Despite his fears about not surviving, Cummins did make it through the war without injury. He moved to Stanton, Mich., in 1872 and farmed there until his death at 85 in 1928.

His descendant Martin Jones of Eagle River, Mich., and Jones’ wife, Carol, had transcribed and copied the letters, and gave the originals to County Historian Catherine L. Emerson, who said they will be on public display in the Historian’s Office.

Cummins was a member of Company H of the 151st New York Volunteer Infantry, which was composed mostly of Lockport-area men. Martin Jones said, “He came very close to death. In one letter, he says he doesn’t think there’s ‘a dozen left in my company.’ ”

At first, the outfit was posted to guard duty around Washington, D.C., but by 1864, the soldiers experienced heavy fighting in northern Virginia, first in the Wilderness campaign in which Union Gen. Ulysses S. Grant sought to seize the initiative from Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee, and then in the Shenandoah Valley.

His letters tell of the decisive battle of Cedar Creek, which started as a rout of the Union forces in a surprise Confederate attack, but ended up with a counterattack that crushed the Southern army in the valley.

“Our army was badly cut up in the forenoon but we paid them back in the p.m.,” Cummins wrote home. “I can truly praise God for his kind protection.”

A few days later, Cummins mailed in his absentee ballot for the 1864 presidential election. He told his parents, “I go for OLD ABE too. He is the man for me.”

Emerson said illness did protect Cummins on one occasion. Because of diarrhea, he missed the Battle of Cold Harbor on June 3, 1864, an attack that Grant in his memoirs admitted was a mistake. He ordered an assault on a well-entrenched Confederate position, and 7,000 Union soldiers were killed or wounded in an hour.

Emerson said she believes Cummins was one of the men who waited outside Appomattox Court House as Lee surrendered to Grant on April 9, 1865.

Wednesday’s ceremony in the rotunda of the Niagara County Courthouse included a group of Civil War re-enactors in full Union uniform, along with some women in period crinoline gowns.

“I don’t want anybody to take this lightly,” County Clerk Wayne F. Jagow said. “This is something that truly is a treasure in Niagara County.”

Jones said of the letters that he obtained from his grandmother, “We are delighted to have them rest in a home where his regiment was formed.”

Printed in the Buffalo News, Tuesday August 27, 2015 page C10