A celluloid photographic button showing Colonel Seneca F. Simmons is fastened to the center of this reunion ribbon. The crimson silk is in good condition, hangs from a brass top bar with floral decoration and has a bullion fringe at bottom. The ink in the letters of printed text has faded but the impression makes it still legible: “Ninth re-union / of the 5^th Reg’t P.R.V.C / at Milton, Penn. May 13, 1896.”

Simmons is shown in a vignette bust wartime view wearing his field officer’s frock coat and shoulder straps. He was a West Point graduate, serving in the 7^th US infantry from the Mexican War to 1861, when he was discharged for promotion and ended up as colonel of the 5^th PA Reserves as of 6/21/61. He was killed in action at New Market Crossroads in Virginia on 6/30/62.

At the beginning of the war Pennsylvania exceeded its federal quota for volunteers, but the state retained the men in service and created a Pennsylvania Volunteer Reserve Corps of 15 regiments organized into division of three brigades who took the field and saw a great deal of action in the war. The 5^th Pennsylvania Reserves were also designated the 34^th Pennsylvania Infantry in the state’s sequence of line regiments. The unit served from June 1861 to June 1864, seeing most of its action while in the 5^th and 1^st Army Corps, and was engaged with losses at such battles as Malvern Hill, Gaines Mill, New Market Crossroads, Antietam, Fredericksburg, Gettysburg, Wilderness, and Spottsylvania, losing 14 officers and 127 men killed or mortally wounded, plus dozens of wounded men who recovered.  [sr]

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