The 56th Pennsylvania Infantry suffered heavily in skirmish fighting in the woods here, reflecting the exhausted and depleted condition of the Army of the Potomac. First Lieutenant Charles E. Baker of Company A commanded the regiment because all of its field staff and staff officers and the 10 company commanders had been killed, wounded, captured, reassigned, or were prisoners. The close fighting in the forest forced the few remaining officers to lead from the front, bringing more casualties. The regiment quickly lost two veteran lieutenants who had risen from the ranks: Benjamin F. Young of Company D was killed and Lemuel Shaw of Company K was wounded. Young was a 34-year-old former painter from Philadelphia with a dark complexion, grey eyes, and dark hair. Shaw was a 23-year-old teacher from Clearfield, Pennsylvania, who survived this wound but was mortally wounded just before the end of the war in March 1865. Another casualty was 20-year-old draftee Private Lorenzo Hipple of Lebanon County, Pennsylvania, who had joined the regiment in September 1863 after working as a boatman. His body was never recovered, and his service record shows that no possessions were found to send home; his widowed mother received only a $100.00 enlistment bounty and $106.40 in back pay. Lieutenant Young and Private Dragoo of the 7th Indiana were originally buried at the Matthews Farm and now lie side by side in Fredericksburg National Cemetery, while almost all the other fallen exhumed from the Matthews Farm rest in unknown graves, and some of the dead were never recovered from the battlefield.
