(This is a continuation of my previous post, which was about a bus tour - "Bringing The Civil War Home To Wisconsin" - which I was a part of. During the tour as the bus was traveling from one place to another, I gave some personal Civil War stories from my family that are included in this post.)
When we reached Kenosha on the second day of our tour, our
motor coach drove to the renovated lakeside area of the city. After lunch, we went to the Civil War Museum
located on 1st Avenue next to Kenosha Harbor. This is a new and magnificent facility that
focuses on the Civil War and how it related to the six Midwest states of
Michigan, Indiana, Illinois, Iowa, Minnesota and Wisconsin. We were given guided tours through the
museum’s main floor display that is called “The Fiery Trial”. The exhibits and displays, some of which are
interactive with audio and video technology, take you on a journey starting in
a Midwest village when the war began.
The displays then continue through the steps taken to becoming a soldier
in the various state units and going off to war. Camp life at the war front, battles and
skirmishes, hospital care and convalescence and other wartime experiences are
graphically depicted in life size dioramas, which concludes with the soldiers
return to their Midwest homes after the war ended.
The display
also includes several interactive displays that draw people into the
experience. One of these displays was a
full size railroad car that was partially filled with soldiers going off to the
war. When you sat next to one of the
lifelike robots, it would turn to you and tell you the real story of a soldier
heading off to war. Moving on to another
seat, you could hear another story told.
At another part of the display, a steamboat heading home from the war
had the same kind of display. As you
walked around the boat and neared an individual standing there, the robot would
relay another tale of actual Civil War experiences.
The
upstairs of the museum houses a rotating display, which at this time tells
about the role of Midwestern troops in the Battles of Vicksburg and Gettysburg. The museum is also a research center and
includes a library with over 2,200 books on the Civil War. Numerous collections of Civil War era letters
are archived at the research center and 85 rolls of microfilm of Civil War
documents and papers are available for research and study. Near the first floor main entrance a Veterans
Memorial Gallery honors all veterans in American conflicts. The displays in this gallery depict
artifacts, drawings and photographs from each war and conflict where
Midwesterners served.
The museum also has a theater area
where we were treated to a wonderful portrayal of a remarkable Wisconsin woman
involved in the Civil War. Cordelia
Harvey was the wife of Louis P. Harvey, who was elected Governor of Wisconsin
in November of 1861. They both became very
involved in helping the troops from their state going off to war. In the spring of 1862, they raised supplies
for those Wisconsin troops and headed south to the front to help deliver the
relief supplies. While visiting at Pittsburg
Landing, Tennessee after the Battle of Shiloh in April 1862, Governor Harvey
was drowned in an accident during a nighttime transfer of steamboats.
After a period of mourning, Mrs.
Harvey championed her husband’s cause by working as a medical inspector at the
front, raising funds and delivering medical and hospital supplies and visiting
the wounded. Her relentless efforts to
help the soldiers in so many ways led to them calling her “The Wisconsin
Angel”. Eventually she went to
Washington D.C. and met with President Lincoln on two occasions to petition for
military hospitals in Wisconsin for care away from the front for wounded
soldiers. The President relented to her
pleas and Cordelia Harvey would eventually open three Veteran’s Hospitals in
Wisconsin and established a Soldiers Orphans’ Home in Madison. Mary Kabakik, a Kenosha actress who was the
first person historical interpreter (more information at cordeliaharvey.com) of Mrs. Harvey, presented an emotional and
inspiring portrayal for our group. After
her wonderful performance, Mary talked to us about her research into the
Cordelia Harvey role that she delivered so flawlessly and of her emotional
commitment to the role. For me, Mary Kabakik’s
performance and discussion were the highlight of our Civil War trip.
As the bus headed north to
Milwaukee, I shared with the tour group another story of a Civil War soldier
from Wisconsin, this time someone from my own family.
George Melvin had first come to
Wisconsin in 1854. He and his wife Mary
Ann and four small children settled in Bad Ax County along the West Fork of the
Kickapoo River, where they carved a homestead out of the wilderness. George was a patriotic man as evidenced by
the names of his children; Zachary Taylor – named after the famous American
general and 12th president of the United States, John Perley – named
after a famous preacher of the time, Winfield Scott – famous American general
in charge of Union forces when the Civil War began, George Washington – named
for the father of our country, and born on May 9, 1861 (less than a month after
the bombardment of Ft Sumter to start the Civil War) – Abraham Lincoln Melvin.
Probably due to his patriotic
fervor to save the Union, George enlisted for military service on November 18,
1861 at the age of 36. He left his wife
and six children – Zachary was the oldest at 13, and enlisted in the army in
the village of Ontario. Eventually he
became a member of Company D, 18th Infantry Regiment of the
Wisconsin Volunteers. After being
haphazardly organized and trained at Camp Trowbridge in Milwaukee, the 18th
Regiment saw its first action in Tennessee at the Battle of Shiloh in
April 1862. As part of the 18th,
Melvin and his fellow soldiers continued fighting at the Battle of Corinth in
Mississippi and crossed the state of Tennessee in pursuit of the Rebel
army. On December 3, 1863, Confederate
forces captured George Melvin near Memphis.
Today, official government records list this date as his death, but it
wasn’t. Eventually he ended up in Andersonville Prison in Georgia in March of
1864.
In letters written home to his
wife, George told of how he was assigned to the hospital unit at the infamous
Confederate prison. His main job was to
dig graves for those who died at the prison.
Since the prison was little more than a death camp, George’s job was
never ending. According to family
stories, George wrote that he was fed well and in good health, but he feared
that one of the graves that he dug might soon be his own. However, he managed and George somehow
survived at Andersonville.
When General Sherman’s Union forces
drew near the prison in the spring of 1865, the Confederacy moved many of the
surviving prisoners at Andersonville to other sites, including Camp Salisbury
in North Carolina. At that camp, between
five and eleven thousand Union prisoners died of disease or starvation and were
buried in a series of trenches there. No
records were kept of the mass burials.
Although there is no official record of where George Melvin was buried,
it was believed by his family that he died on the march away from Andersonville
or that he may be in one of those mass graves at Camp Salisbury in North
Carolina. He never came back to the
Kickapoo Valley.
At the Salem Cemetery in rural
Vernon County, near where many of George Melvin’s children and grandchildren
lived, and next to the gravestone for his wife Mary (who passed in 1899), there
is a simple tombstone and a Civil War veteran’s memorial medallion which holds
an American flag for a fallen Union soldier, lying forever far away from his
home.
The third day of the excursion was
spent at Wade House, a Wisconsin Historical Society site located hallway
between Fond du Lac and Sheboygan at the small hamlet of Greenbush. Each fall, Wade House hosts a Civil War
reenactment and our tour spent the day there for the occasion. It was the largest gathering of Civil War re-
enactors in the state and provided an interesting look back as the two sides
met at the Battle of Chickamauga, a battle fought in northern Georgia in
September of 1863.
When we first arrived, our tour
group was transported to a command center near the battlefield where we heard
from General Grant and President Lincoln.
They talked about their views of the war in September of 1863. Portrayers Frank Beaman (Grant) and Fritz
Klein (Lincoln) provided wonderful first-person information on the state of the
war for our group. Later that morning,
many in the tour group visited the two army camps located near the battleground
and heard nurses tell of medical practices in the battlefield hospital set up
nearby. A skirmish broke out as the Confederate
artillery opened fire on a hill position commanded by Union forces. A cannon from a Wisconsin artillery unit was
perilously close to capture, but was saved by a rousing cavalry battle that
repelled the Rebel advance.
Later that afternoon, the battle
began in earnest with a twenty-minute artillery duel between the Union and
Rebel artillery pieces. A dozen cannon
blasted away at each other as cavalry units on both sides tried to flank the
lines. Suddenly a large army of
Confederate infantry emerged from the woods and attacked the fortified hill
position. The cannon from the Wisconsin
artillery unit was captured and all members of the ordinance crew were
killed. Soon the Rebs amassed and the
infantry let loose a deadly fuselage of fire against the Union troops. Charge after charge by the Rebels was
repulsed, but eventually the Confederacy carried the day and drove the Boys in
Blue from the field. The Southern army
had won the battle and stopped the Union campaign from moving into Georgia.
On the bus ride back to Madison
that afternoon, I told the group another Civil War story taken from my family.
Phillip Steinmetz was 20 years old and lived in Union County,
Pennsylvania when the Civil War began.
He was a student at Lewisburg Academy at the time, preparing to become a
Lutheran minister as his grandfather and great-grandfather had before him. He attended one more year of college, and
then enlisted in Company E of the 142nd Regiment of the Pennsylvania
Volunteers on August 20, 1862.
On December 13th of that year, Phillip’s
regiment was involved in the ill-fated attack on Marye’s Heights at the Battle
of Fredericksburg in Virginia. During
the afternoon portion of the attack, Phillip was shot in the arm as he handed a
rifle to a comrade (who was killed at the same time in the fusillade of
gunfire). The mini-ball shattered the
bones in Phillip’s forearm and when taken to the hospital tent, army surgeons
prepared to amputate his arm. But Phillip
begged them to save his arm and they did not do the surgery, possibly because
of the many more serious wounds that the doctors had to deal with during the
battle. Eventually after Phillip stayed
several months in the hospital, the arm healed, but he only had partial control
of his hand (his fingers remained curled for the rest of his life). He was discharged from the 142nd
on March 9, 1863 and returned to his home in Union County.
Before the war was over, Philip
moved with his family to Seneca County, Ohio where he and his brothers worked
in the shipyards and war warehouses.
After the war, Phillip became a farmer and married Dorothea Krause, a
Seneca County girl, and they immediately began raising a family. In 1875, Phillip, and two of Dorothea’s
brothers set out to the West to look for new farms and homes. Dorothea and their five children would come
later when land was found. The men first
looked at farmland in southern Indiana, but found it much too Southern (as in
CSA Southern) for their tastes. They
moved on toward Wisconsin, where they heard that cheap and good land was
abundant. As they were driving the
wagons west, Phillip’s arm that was wounded in the war began to swell due to
the constant vibrations and stress of driving the team. Stopping in the Chicago area, a doctor there
prescribed that the arm should be amputated at the elbow. Phillip again refused so the doctor cut open
the arm to reduce the swelling and drained some of the liquid. After resuming the trip towards Wisconsin,
the wounded arm continued to fester.
Phillip saw a doctor in Waukesha County, who opened up his arm and
removed several large bone splinters that had worked themselves loose from the
original war wound. After several weeks
of rehabilitation, Phillip and the Krause’s drove their wagons across Wisconsin
to Bad Ax County where they staked out claims on over three hundred acres
located on Morning Star Ridge on the eastern side of the county. That fall, Dorothea and the children arrived
by train at Union Center, the nearest railroad depot to the farms, where
Phillip and her brothers met them. The
family was soon settled into their new home on Morning Star Ridge. In Wisconsin, six more boys were added to the
Steinmetz family and the ten brothers and sister Mary all grew up in the La
Farge area of Vernon County.
Phillip became a charter member of
the Grand Army of The Republic (GAR) Post #154 in nearby Star (Seelyburg) when
it was founded. Phillip attended the GAR
veteran’s reunions, which were held annually in La Farge, with pride for the
rest of his life. He passed away in
1908. On his grave in the Bear Creek
Cemetery located outside of La Farge, an American flag held in a GAR veteran’s
bronze medallion marks the spot where a veteran of the Civil War rests.
