Landmarks with Leon is now also known as Lehigh Valley Landmarks. I'm your host, Rachel Leon, and president of the City Council in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. Each week, I'll share a short feature with a big story commemorated with a historical marker that explores a person, place, or an event important to the Lehigh Valley.
On July 1, 1898, outside Santiago de Cuba, a colonel from Easton was struck down leading a charge across an open field toward entrenched Spanish positions. He died within minutes. In the chaos that followed, his second-in-command was shot. Then the officer after him was shot too.
Command of the brigade passed to a fourth man before the fighting even slowed. That colonel, Charles Augustus Wikoff, became the highest- ranking United States Army officer killed in the entire Spanish-American War.
For Easton, the loss was deeply personal. It was also the final chapter of a military career that had begun nearly four decades earlier, in a very different kind of conflict.
Charles Augustus Wikoff was born in Easton in March 1837 and graduated from Lafayette College with the Class of 1855. He first worked as a civil engineer on the Illinois Central Railroad and had begun studying law by the time Fort Sumter was attacked. The Civil War changed his path entirely.
In April 1861, Wikoff enlisted as a private in Company H of the 1st Pennsylvania Infantry. Within weeks, he accepted a commission as a first lieutenant in the Regular Army’s 15th Infantry. His first great test came at Shiloh, Tennessee, in April 1862, where he was wounded and lost his left eye. The injury did not end his career — it became part of the physical record of a soldier who kept serving for decades, carrying the mark of that early battle through everything that followed.
Wikoff fought again at Chickamauga and Missionary Ridge. His performance under fire earned him brevet promotions, first to captain and later to major — honorary ranks awarded for battlefield gallantry, granting the recognition of a higher rank without changing an officer’s permanent grade.
After the Civil War, Wikoff remained in uniform, serving with the 24th and 11th Infantry regiments on posts scattered across Texas and the Dakota Territory. Frontier service in the American West looked nothing like the Civil War. Instead of mass armies and set-piece battles, officers managed isolated outposts, long distances between commands, and campaigns tied to the nation’s westward expansion — a slower, grinding kind of soldiering that lasted years.
By January 1897, Wikoff had reached the colonelcy of the 22nd United States Infantry. When war broke out with Spain in 1898, he led the regiment from Fort Crook, Nebraska, to Cuba, arriving that June. He was then placed in command of the Third Brigade, Second Division, Fifth Army Corps. On July 1, that brigade advanced during the fighting around San Juan Hill. Wikoff was struck in the chest and died within minutes. He was buried temporarily near the battlefield before his remains were returned home to Easton later that year.
His funeral drew a massive local response — businesses closed, and residents lined the streets for the procession. Easton Cemetery became his permanent resting place, where his monument still stands today in Section M. Wikoff’s name did not end with his death. Later in 1898, the U.S. Army established Camp Wikoff at Montauk Point, New York, as a reception and quarantine camp for troops returning from Cuba — named in his honor as word of his death spread across the country.
Wikoff’s life is not simply a story of battlefield bravery. It is a record of how a local education, a changing nation, and a professional army could carry one Easton man from a railroad engineering job to command of American soldiers on a foreign battlefield — a career spanning the Civil War, the frontier army, and the country’s first overseas conflict.
Lafayette College in Easton, Pennsylvania holds Charles Wikoff alumni record while his grave and monument place his story firmly within the city that raised him. It’s worth asking, standing at that monument: when a community remembers a military leader, are we remembering only the final battle — or the entire life that led him there?
Information for this episode was provided by Lafayette College’s Record of the Men of Lafayette, the 22nd Infantry Regiment history, the Historic Easton Cemetery, and the Historical Marker Database. (wc 674)
