[S] Many opinions exist as to what and where the Petersburg Express was. Some even aver that it was a Confederate institution. General H. L. Abbot, in his History of the First Connecticut Heavy Artillery, has the following, "To check an annoying enfilade firing from the left bank of the Appomattox, a thirteen inch sea coast mortar was mounted on a curve of the Railroad track by Company G. This novelty was widely known as the 'Petersburg Express.' The mortar, on a heavy granite foundation, since Sept. 25, 1902, has stood upon the State House grounds, Hartford, as a memorial to the First Heavies." [T] Peter Lyle, Colonel of the Ninetieth Pennsylvania, Bvt. Brig. General, and for much of the service of the Thirty-ninth in the Fifth Corps, commander of the Brigade, was born in Philadelphia, Christmas Day, 1821. Receiving very little education from the schools, he was apprenticed to the cigar trade while yet a boy. His marked boyish predelection was love for military matters, and he drilled his boyish associates, formed into a company, till they became noted for their proficiency, accomplishing in their juvenile way wonders with their broomstick guns. When only sixteen years of age, during the absence of the officers, he commanded and paraded the City Phalanx. While still a youth he organized an independent company which he commanded until it was taken into the National Guards. In 1846 he succeeded to the command of the company which before the war had increased to a battalion, becoming a regiment in 1860 under the command of Colonel Lyle. His organization had volunteered for service in the Mexican War but, the quota being full, it did not go. At the outbreak of the Rebellion, the Regiment, as the Nineteenth Pennsylvania, volunteered and so served for three months. Reorganized in August, 1861, it was sworn in for three years as the Ninetieth Regiment, still commanded by Colonel Lyle. He never fully recovered from a wound received at Antietam. Subsequent to the war he was elected sheriff in 1867, being a Democrat in politics, serving a single term. Much that he had acquired during his term was absorbed by an agricultural venture in Maryland which, failing finally, he was thrown entirely upon the outcome of carriage making, a business to which he gave immediate attention after the discharge of the Regiment, his associate being his late Adjutant, David P. Weaver. His last public appearance in a military capacity was during the riots of 1877 when, though suffering agonies from bodily ills, he sat his saddle and discharged his duties faithfully. Soon after he declined a re-election to the command of the Regiment and died in Philadelphia, July 17, 1879. His burial was attended with all the honors due a full Brigadier General, his body having lain in state in the armory of his Regiment that he had led so long and so well; it was buried in Ivy Hill Cemetery by the side of his brother, David M. Lyle, the last