Credit: Library of Congress
A native of Vermont, William Farrar Smith (1824-1903) was a West point graduate, topographical engineer, and professor of mathematics at U.S. Military Academy before the war. Known to his friends as "Baldy," he by 1862 commanded the Sixth Corps in the Army of the Potomac. In the summer of 1863, Smith commanded troops in the Department of the Susquehanna. When J.E.B. Stuart on July 1 shelled Carlisle and burned the U.S. Army Barracks, it was Smith who three times refused to surrender. In the 1880s Smith moved to Philadelphia, where he died in 1903.
