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The Civil War Years.
George H. Pray was born April 13, 1834 in Waterville Maine, the eldest of 2 sons from the marriage of Edmund Pray Jr. and Abigail Willey. A carpenter by trade, George enlisted in Company D of the 16th Regiment of the Maine Infantry on August 4, 1863 at 29 years of age.
In 1863 President Lincoln invoked a Draft to help fulfill quotas for soldiers to fill the ranks of fighting units. Most states including Maine instituted a lottery system with established quotas for different towns and cities. A draftee with the means to pay someone willing to take his place could avoid the hardship of going to war. George agreed to substitute for a gentleman by the name of Sewall T. Fowler from Cape Elizabeth for 300 dollars, the going rate at that time.
What motivated George to leave the serenity of Maine for the almost certain front lines of battle? A scant five weeks before George's enlistment ceremony a confederate privateer sailed into Portland Harbor posing as a fishing vessel and seized a cutter belonging to the Revenue Service, the USRC Caleb Cushing. The Battle of Portland Harbor likely stirred up local outrage and patriotic fervor, however more than likely the 300 dollar substitute payment was a contributing factor in George's decision to enlist. In 1863 300 dollars was worth over 5,000 in 2010 dollars.
The following is a timeline of the battles George Pray likely participated in, up to and including his capture by General Lee's soldiers...
August 16, 1863 - George's Civil War records indicate that he was at Rappahannock Station Virginia (now Remington, Virginia).
October 9-23, 1863 - Bristoe Campaign.
November 7-8, 1863 - Second Battle of Rappahannock Station.
November 27, 1863 – December 2, 1863 - Mine Run Campaign.
Dec 1863 to Apr 1864 - The Army of the Potomac went into winter quarters at Brandy Station, Virginia.
February 6-7, 1864 - Battle of Morton's Ford.
May 5-7, 1864 - Battles of the Wilderness.
May 8-21, 1864 - Battle of Spotsylvania Court House.
May 23-26, 1864 - North Anna River Campaign .
May 26-28, 1864 - Line of the Pamunkey.
May 28-31, 1864 - Totopotomoy Creek.
June 1-12, 1864 - Bethesda Church/Cold Harbor.
June 6, 1864 - George reported Missing from skimish line in Coal Harbor (Cold Harbor) Virginia, near Bethesda Church
Excerpt from.... The Sixteenth Maine Regiment in the War of the Rebellion, 1861-1865:
June 5, 1864
In the night the regiment was quietly withdrawn
from the enemy s front, and marched rapidly some
five miles to Cold Harbor, where the corps was put
in reserve. A part of the Sixteenth left on the skir
mish line at Bethesda Church was captured. Some of
the men escaped and rejoined us here. Clothing and
shoes were issued. Lieutenant-Colonel Farnham was
detailed as division inspector-general, and chief-of-
staff to General Crawford.
Note from Dale... I believe George was captured by the Rebels sometime on June 5th, perhaps in the morning. George's military records report him missing on June 6th near Bethesda Church. George and a number of his battle buddies from the Sixteenth Maine Regiment were either ordered to stay in their trench near Bethesda Church to watch for an attack from that sector or mistakenly abandoned as the rest of the division pulled out of Bethesda Church and marched towards Cold Harbor.
Excerpt from... History of the Sixth New Hampshire Regiment in the war for the Union...
The next day the 5th about 9 am we saw across the field at our right a large number of men dodging around in the woods Some said they were Johnnies getting ready to attack us while others remarked that they had on blue uniforms We raised a flag and when they saw it they came out into the field and over to our lines They proved to be Fifth Corps pickets who had been left on the front line the night before while the main body moved away to the left and rear of us without notifying them Accordingly when daylight came and they had waited a long time to be relieved they sent back one of their number to see what the matter was Only a veteran can imagine the feelings of those picket guards when their messenger returned to say that the corps had moved he knew not whither Giving the enemy a few parting shots they quietly fell back and marched to the left hoping to overtake their corps When they came in sight of our brigade they did not know whether we were friends or enemies till they saw the old flag which we held up They were between our lines and those of the enemy and would soon have been captured had we not discovered them and called them in for the rebels were following them up and succeeded in shooting some of them before they reached our lines They said some very hard things about their commanders for leaving them out on the picket line and not notifying them that the corps was going to withdraw during the night and it was about as mean a trick as could have been played on them There was no excuse for it for the pickets would have remained at their post as long as they were ordered to do so and there was no need of their remaining after daylight
Prisoner of war records indicate George was confined June 7 at Richmond Virginia the capital of the Confederacy. The next day he was herded on to a crowded train box car enroute to Andersonville Georgia's infamous Camp Sumter Prison. The tortuous trip usually took 5 to 6 days.
There are hundreds of web sites describing the nasty and brutal conditions endured at Andersonville Prison. Wikipedia has an informative page...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andersonville_National_Historic_Site
April 9, 1865 - Lee surrendered his Army of Northern Virginia at the McLean House in the village of Appomattox Court House.
April 16, 1865 - In Vicksburg Mississippi, George is admitted to the SS Baltic hospital ship with anemia.
April 23, 1865 - George arrives at Jefferson Barracks, United States General Hospital in St Louis Missouri. He and fellow released prisoners traveled from Vicksburg Mississippi via the SS Baltic a wooden-hulled sidewheel steamer under contract to the US Government.
April 24, 1865 - Returned to duty.
April 27, 1865 - Sent to College Green Barracks Annapolis Maryland.
May 2, 1865 - Furloughed for 30 days.
May 18, 1865 - Marked present in Annapolis Maryland.
June 26, 1865 - Mustered out of the Army.
The Magic Years.
It has long been a family legend that Great-Great-Grandfather George H. Pray juggled potatoes and fruit while a Civil War POW at Andersonville. No one seems to know whether George practiced juggling and sleight of hand feats prior to becoming a soldier but he certainly had plenty of time to refine his craft while imprisoned. There was a lane running the length of one side of the stockade called Market Street where prisoners with something to barter or sell would gather. I can picture George juggling away and performing sleight of hand tricks and making bets and challenges to score something good to eat or perhaps some useful item.
I don't have any documents to indicate where and when George and Alice Maria Jones were Married. Just over a year after George was released from the military and returned to Maine they gave birth to their first child, Winfred Leighton (Fred) Pray, born July 7, 1866. Their second child was Eugenia born in 1870 and last was Adelbert born Feb 2, 1872.
Prof. Pray, a Lewiston man who for years has had an extraordinary career as a sleight of hand performer, and during this time has visited all of the states in the union except New Mexico, and has exhibited his skill in many thousands of Sunday school entertainments and State institutions for the mentally diseased.
We have no way of knowing when George started performing professionally, however I was able to locate a newspaper clipping from the Hartford Weekly Times of August 9, 1877 showing that "Professor Pray" entertained at the Strawberry Hill House on a Saturday Evening and at the Sinclair House on Monday night.
Below is a clipping from the Pittsburg dispatch., February 27, 1889 that does a wonderful job of describing George's AKA Professor Pray's performance:
Professor Pray shown here with an assortment of orbs, bells and props used in his performance of mystery and magic.
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A map illustrating the section of the Cold Harbor Battlefield known as Bethesda Church where George was thought to be captured June 5, 1864.
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A newspaper clipping from the August 12, 1899 edition of the Boston Evening Transcript. George was performing at the Magnolia Hotel on the North Shore of Massachusetts.
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Hartford Weekly Times - Aug 9, 1877
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The Norfolk Virginian., March 14, 1896
http://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn85025715/1896-03-14/ed-1/seq-2/
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The Lewiston Daily Sun - May 15, 1902
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George's obituary has a very nice description of his career that brought him all over the USA, into Canada and Mexico as well.
Click Here for an interesting PDF file of an article entitled "How juggling spuds helped Mainer survive". It was published in the Times Record News
Lewiston Evening Journal - Feb 12, 1903
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George's Great Great Grand Son, Dale Pray, checking out a Shebang at the Historic National Site of Andersonville Prison.
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Great Great Grand Son Jeff Bolduc standing at the burial site of George H. Pray.
How juggling spuds helped Mainer survive
Seth_Koenig@TimesRecord.Com
11/07/2008
WOOLWICH — During the Civil War, 12,913 inmates died from the extreme conditions in the Confederate prison in Andersonville, Ga. One Union soldier who didn't was Pvt. George H. Pray, a clever Mainer whose stage act perhaps saved his life. "How he survived Andersonville was that he juggled potatoes," said Jeffrey Bolduc, Pray's great-great-grandson, recently. "After he juggled them, he kept them and ate them."
An innocent foray into family genealogy had pulled Bolduc, of Woolwich, back into the almost mystical life of Pray. In turn, Bolduc launched a present-day quest to honor his ancestor with one thing the late magician could never make appear: A gravestone. Pray died in 1903 of natural causes at the age of 68, almost 40 years after he dodged the reaper in a Civil War prison camp that became famous for its horrifying conditions.
During the Civil War, wealthy citizens could pay poorer ones to take their place at war, and so a Cape Elizabeth man named Sewall T. Fowler gave Pray $300 in August 1863 to join Company D of the 16th Maine Infantry. About 10 months later, in early June 1864, Union records list Pray as missing from the skirmish line near Coal Harbor, Va. Two days later, his name appeared on the rolls at the Confederate prison in Andersonville.
Food there was in short supply and prisoners were reportedly forced to use the same three-acre marsh as both a sink and toilet. Stephen Berry is an assistant professor of history at the University of Georgia and expert on Civil War America. Berry said many of the war prisoners who didn't die at Andersonville didn't come out much better. Berry referred to the post-war closure of the camp as "the release of the undead."
"The conditions were brutal, of course, and it was essentially an open stockade," he said. "So it wasn't just a lack of food, it was the exposure (to the elements). You had people who were naked, half-naked and diseased. The human mind could only take so much, so even people who didn't die of disease or starvation came out of there partially insane." Berry said Pray's juggling act for his Confederate captors was likely more than just a ruse to slip an extra ration of food into his pocket. "I can imagine it would have helped keep him sane to have something to do, something to keep his mind upon," said Berry. "It must have been unbearable."
A life on the road.
After the Civil War, Pray made it his mission to strike down
boredom wherever it could be found. "After the war was over, he went all over the United States, Mexico and Canada performing magic," said Bolduc. In the years after his prison act kept potatoes in his belly and lunacy from creeping into his mind, Pray once again turned to his showmanship for survival — this time for income. But although life as a traveling magician in the late 1800s was no prison camp, it wasn't cushy, either.
"It was kind of a unique and strange world," said "Professor" Joe Kerrigan, a Pennsylvania man who knows a thing or two about the topic. "They performed in some of the affluent homes in the country or caught on with a traveling show. It was a rough life. They traveled by carriage and, during the war itself, they had to finagle both sides to get from one place to another."
Kerrigan is a historian who still performs Civil War-era magic. He serves as the main attraction at a live dinner theater at the same Fairfield Inn where Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee and his officers stopped to eat while retreating from the nearby Battle of Gettysburg. Kerrigan notes that "'professor' was a common title that magicians wore," and as such, George H. Pray spent many of his adult years known as "Professor Pray."
Some of the tricks a magician like Pray would have done, said Kerrigan, included the "cabalistic clock" and "the old classic cups and balls trick." In the cabalistic clock routine, he said, the magician would start with a clock face with a detachable dial and ask audience members to arbitrarily pick a time. "He would give it a spin, and 'if the spirits were cooperative,' the dial would land on the time (the audience member chose), explained Kerrigan. "He would build various levels of trust with the audience until he let an audience member spin it on their own — and it still worked."
As for the cups and balls? That trick began with three cups and three balls, "often made out of metal." "Through various manipulations, the balls would jump from one cup to another or all three would end up under one cup," said Kerrigan. "And then as a grand finale, an orange would appear under one of the cups and the balls would disappear."
According to a simple 1903 obituary for Pray that Bolduc
uncovered, the juggling Civil War veteran met many powerful
people in his travels and collected signatures of "college presidents and people of note all over the country" in a book.
The obituary also notes that he "raised a great deal of money for charities," with a particular mention of "insane hospitals" — perhaps in memory of psychologically scarred friends who never quite recovered from Andersonville.
'I'm some proud' Bolduc has framed a picture of Pray along with a medal he would have won by fighting in the Civil War. Pray married Alice Maria Jones and went on to have three children, but he didn't live long enough to perform magic tricks for any of his grandchildren.
The Meadow Road resident tracked down his great-great-
grandfather's gravesite at the Riverside Cemetery in Lewiston, but there was no marker there. "He'd been resting for 105 years at Riverside, but he'd never had a gravestone," said Bolduc. "So, 105 years late, his great-great-grandson got a stone for him. I'm some proud of doing this for him."
The stone, which sits flat on the ground and is accompanied by a small American flag, reads: "Pvt. George H. Pray, Co. D 16th Maine Inf., GAR-Civil War, 1834-1903, Magician."
"I've been asked if I had any magic skills," said Bolduc, "but I didn't get any of that." Pray may have had all the family's prestidigitation talent, but after more than a century, his great-great-grandson made the simple honor of a grave marker appear out of thin air.
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