The Gallant Sims: A Civil War Hero Rediscovered

Members save 10% on eligible products at checkout with their ID number.   By Jeffery I. Richman If you’re familiar with the phrase “the dustbin of history," you’ll shudder to learn that it’s almost where the extraordinary story of Brooklynite and Civil War captain Samuel Sims ended up. But fate intervened. First a huge cache of his letters and personal drawings were rescued from a garbage truck in California, and second, a trove of Sims’s photos and letters were discovered in a trunk in Connecticut basement. Who was Sims? The Brooklyn Daily Eagle wrote that he was “as brave a man as ever drew a sword.” In 1886, 22 years after his death in battle, his former comrades banded together to pay for an extraordinary gravesite monument here at Green-Wood.  A few years back, Jeff Richman, Green-Wood's historian, negotiated the purchase on behalf of The Green-Wood Historic Fund of the Sims Collection--objects and papers lovingly saved for more than a century by Civil War Captain Samuel Sims's d