At the Battle of South Mountain on September 14, Joseph Hooker's I Corps attacked the Confederates holding Turner's Pass while preventing a potential flanking maneuver to its north.

The regiment, along with the rest of the army, had been marching since June 12 up from Virginia, through Maryland, and into southern Pennsylvania.

They were headed toward an eventual clash with the Confederate Army that was fated to take place in and around the little market town of Gettysburg.

The 16th Maine fought bitterly for approximately three hours in the fields north of the Chambersburg Pike; but by mid-afternoon, it was evident that, even with the addition of the rest of the 1st Corps and the entire 11th Corps, the position of the Union forces could not be held.

Historians say the 16th Maine fought valiantly, but its soldiers turned their attention to saving their beloved flags when they realized that defeat was inevitable.

As the Southern troops bore down upon them, the men of the 16th Maine spontaneously began to tear up into little pieces their "colors."

"For a few last moments our little regiment defended angrily its hopeless challenge, but it was useless to fight longer," Abner Small of the 16th Maine wrote after the battle.

That was the 16th Maine's "greatest day," wrote Earl Hess, a history professor at Lincoln Memorial University in Tennessee, in an introduction to a collection of Small's Civil War letters published in 2000.

Hess said that the 16th Maine's actions show that battle flags carried "very, very deep symbolism for Civil War soldiers, "representing the "esprit de corps" of a regiment and "a larger entity -- the country, the cause."

Most of the 16th Maine survivors treasured these remnants for the rest of their lives and bequeathed them to their descendants, some of whom still possess them as family heirlooms to this day.

By sunset on July 1, 11 officers and men of the 16th Maine had been killed, 62 had been wounded, and 159 had been taken prisoner.

Only 38 men of the Regiment managed to evade being captured and report for duty at 1st Corps headquarters.

Those whose retreat they had covered were able to establish a very strong position just east and south of the center of the town of Gettysburg along Cemetery Ridge.

For the next two days they would withstand successive assaults by the Confederates until the final repulse of Pickett's Charge, on July 3.