BY CLINT SCHEMMER

The great-grandson of the Union soldier considered the most wounded man to survive the Civil War came to Chancellorsville to pass along his family's most cherished possession.

Steve Chase traveled from his Texas home yesterday to give Pvt. John F. Chase's Medal of Honor to the National Park Service just as he'd promised months ago.

That was special enough, as all four dozen onlookers at the Park Service's Chancellorsville Visitor Center appeared to appreciate. But then came a last-minute surprise.

John Hennessy, chief historian of Fredericksburg and Spotsylvania National Military Park, revealed that another artifact relating to Pvt. Chase had just surfaced: an old wooden cane.

The cane is finely etched--like a piece of scrimshaw--with a portrait of Chase, an image of the monument to the 5th Maine Battery on the Gettysburg battlefield, and the inscription "Cannonier, J.F. Chase, 5th Maine Batt." At one end, near the handle, are the words "Culp's Hill."

Curator Janice Frye, wearing white gloves, brought the artifact to the front of the visitor center's auditorium for Steve Chase and his wife, Nancy Kay, to see for the first time. They clearly were intrigued.

"This is like the cherry on top of the sundae," Chase said.

Hennessy said the cane may have been made for John Chase, given his considerable postwar fame. Souvenir canes were popular with Civil War veterans.

Chase said he figures that his great-grandfather probably acquired the keepsake at a veterans reunion at Gettysburg long after the war.

Hennessy learned of the artifact's existence late Friday and immediately called its owner, Spotsylvania resident Jan VanLandingham. She told him, "Why, I have a cane "

That morning, when VanLandingham had read a Free Lance-Star article about Pvt. Chase, she realized the 19th-century walking stick, mingled with others in her foyer's umbrella jar, probably had some link to the Medal of Honor recipient.

She and her sister had come upon the cane in the early 1970s while helping clear out her uncle's moving-and-storage warehouse in St. Petersburg, Fla.--where Chase moved from Maine long after the war and lived until his death in 1914.