William Conway (U.S. Navy)
Encyclopedia
United States Navy
The United States Navy is the naval warfare service branch of the United States Armed Forces and one of the seven uniformed services of the United States. The U.S. Navy is the largest in the world; its battle fleet tonnage is greater than that of the next 13 largest navies combined. The U.S...
quartermaster
Quartermaster
Quartermaster refers to two different military occupations depending on if the assigned unit is land based or naval.In land armies, especially US units, it is a term referring to either an individual soldier or a unit who specializes in distributing supplies and provisions to troops. The senior...
born in Camden, Maine
Camden, Maine
Camden is a town in Knox County, Maine, United States. The population was 5,254 at the 2000 census. The population of the town more than triples during the summer months, due to tourists and summer residents. Camden is a famous summer colony in the Mid-Coast region of Maine...
. At the surrender of Pensacola Navy Yard (also known as Warrington Navy Yard) to the rebels on January 12, 1861, Confederate
Confederate States of America
The Confederate States of America was a government set up from 1861 to 1865 by 11 Southern slave states of the United States of America that had declared their secession from the U.S...
Lieutenant Frederick B. Kinshaw ordered Conway to lower the American flag. He replied: "I have served under that flag for forty years, and I won't do it." For his refusal, Conway was arrested and clapped in irons. Shortly afterward he was sent north, where he remained until his death at Brooklyn, New York. For his patriotic action, Conway was presented with a gold medal by citizens of California
California
California is a state located on the West Coast of the United States. It is by far the most populous U.S. state, and the third-largest by land area...
. In August 1906, the Quartermaster William Conway Monument was unveiled at Camden, a granite
Granite
Granite is a common and widely occurring type of intrusive, felsic, igneous rock. Granite usually has a medium- to coarse-grained texture. Occasionally some individual crystals are larger than the groundmass, in which case the texture is known as porphyritic. A granitic rock with a porphyritic...
boulder
Boulder
In geology, a boulder is a rock with grain size of usually no less than 256 mm diameter. While a boulder may be small enough to move or roll manually, others are extremely massive....
affixed with a commemorative bronze
Bronze
Bronze is a metal alloy consisting primarily of copper, usually with tin as the main additive. It is hard and brittle, and it was particularly significant in antiquity, so much so that the Bronze Age was named after the metal...
plaque
Commemorative plaque
A commemorative plaque, or simply plaque, is a plate of metal, ceramic, stone, wood, or other material, typically attached to a wall, stone, or other vertical surface, and bearing text in memory of an important figure or event...
"honoring his sturdy loyalty."