October 10, 2024 at 6:30 pm
Hazard Stevens was a force of nature and nurture: a Rhode Islander of the “best sort” who left Harvard to fight alongside his father General Isaac Stevens, the first governor of the Washington Territory.
The Stevenses led the December 1861 occupation of Beaufort, SC, before Isaac was dramatically killed and Hazard wounded at the 1862 Battle of Chantilly. A colonelcy was arranged for young hero Stevens to recruit for the 1st Loyal Virginia Regiment. While on the Eastern Shore of Virginia, Stevens braved a hail of bullets while single handedly attempting to rescue a vessel during the 1864 Confederate Raid on Cherrystone. He remained intrepid and, in 1870, Stevens and mountaineer P. B. Van Trump made the first successful ascent of Mt. Rainier.
Stevens then returned to Massachusetts and an unsuccessful Congressional bid. His final decades were spent in law, farming, and leadership in Washington State. Congress awarded him the Medal of Honor in 1894 for his bravery at the 1863 Battle of Fort Huger and, in 1905, Stevens made a second successful ascent of Rainier. He remained a child of Newport until his 1918 death and rests today in the Island Cemetery.
Kellee Green Blake is the retired Director of the National Archives-Mid Atlantic Region and a Phi Beta Kappa, Summa Cum Laude graduate of Mary Washington College with a graduate degree in American History from Villanova University. She has worked from coast to coast with the National Archives, processing and administering records from the Founding Fathers to the Robert F. Kennedy Assassination. Kellee has been a regular speaker at national historical and genealogical conferences and is the author of two historical plays and multiple articles on the Federal Census, divided loyalties in wartime, and the law practice of Abraham Lincoln. She serves on several preservation and humanities boards and is writing a long overdue book about the Civil War occupation of Virginia’s Eastern Shore.
