James Merrill Linn (1833-1897) was one of the first graduates of Bucknell University (Class of 1855). Linn joined the army at the start of the Civil War as a captain in the 51st Pennsylvania Infantry Regiment. Linn took part in General Ambrose Burnside's expedition to North Carolina; he kept a daily diary of his experiences, and wrote almost daily to his family back home, including in his correspondence notes, drawings and other papers that recorded his observations of the campaign on the Chesapeake. After the war Linn returned to Lewisburg and remained for the rest of his life, serving as a lawyer and civic figure, as well as a loyal Bucknell alum. Linn’s family left his life papers to Bucknell’s Special Collections and University Archives. Very few people have even looked at Linn’s papers, let alone tried to make sense of his experience as a Bucknellian in the 19th century.
Over the past decade groups of students, faculty, and staff have encoded and analyzed these texts to tell the story of this average man who lived an extraordinary life. Because of the sheer quantity of notes, diaries, letters, drawings, business accounts and documents in the archives, we only begun to focus on a small sliver of Linn’s life. To date we have focused on a period of six month period during 1862 when Linn took part in the North Carolina expedition.