William H. Howe, a Union private from Perkiomenville in Montgomery County, Pennsylvania, was hanged at Fort Mifflin on 26 August 1864 for desertion and murder, the only prisoner known to have been executed at the fort during the Civil War. During the Civil War the fort held Confederate prisoners of war, Union soldiers and civilians. Howe served with the 116th Pennsylvania Volunteers and was praised for his bravery at the Battle of Fredericksburg in December 1862. Ill with an inflammation of the bowels, he left the regiment and went home, where he was confined to bed for about two months. Around midnight on 21 June 1863, men came to his house to arrest him as a deserter.
A gunfight followed and the enrolling officer, Abraham Bertolet, was shot dead; accounts differ on who fired first. Howe was arrested in Allentown on 13 July 1863. A court martial in November 1863 sentenced him to hang, but the verdict was overturned for irregularities in the trial, and a second court martial convicted him again in 1864. His former commander asked for clemency, and President Lincoln declined to pardon him. At Fort Mifflin he was held in Casemate 11, an underground cell, and he led an attempted escape involving about 200 prisoners.
His body was sent to his widow. In August 2006, almost exactly 142 years after the hanging, the fort's caretaker Wayne Irby found the cell after the ground gave way beneath him while mowing, and above a doorway found the name W.H. Howe, both handwritten and printed. A ghost called the Faceless Man, said by legend to be Howe, is part of the fort's tours. The fort, first built by the British in 1771, was decommissioned in 1954.
Getting there
39.8753, -75.2130
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