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William was 21 when war was declared in April 1861 and when the call for
volunteers to the 84th Pennsylvania came to town, he and many others,
including several of his uncles and cousins, filled with the bravado of
war, joined the fight to retain the Union. As with all, I am sure he
was certain he would return home in a month or so a hero with stories to
tell of the great battles he had fought. Perhaps he had a sweetheart
whom he planned to marry upon his return, someone special to wave goodbye
to him as he marched out of town on his way to the bloodiest war ever to
be fought on America soil.
But William did not return from
this war, his sweetheart, his mother, brothers and sisters would never see
him again. And not for William would be a heroic death, his life
lost to a rebel bullet in a charge to take a hill, bayonets fixed and the
smoke from hundreds of rifles hanging like a thick fog over the
battlefield. William's fate was to be that of so many others who
entered this conflict to die not at the hands of a mortal enemy with whom
you could fight, but by the ravages of a much more merciless and unfeeling
foe, disease.
As with many young boys from the
farms in open country, the diseases they would encounter in the cold, wet
camps during this war were not common to them, but brought by soldiers
from the large cities with whom they mixed in squalid and close
conditions. Because they had no resistance it felled them one after
another. There is a letter in possession of the historian of
the 84th Pennsylvania, which more than likely refers to William's death,
along with another. The man, in his letter, calls the two boys the
largest and healthiest of their group, brought low and killed by the
fever. And so William passed in West Virginia, shortly after his
22nd birthday on 10 Feb 1862, just four brief months after he left
Pennsylvania full of glory.
His family was one of the lucky
ones, they were able to bring the body home for burial. Many, many
men lie in unmarked graves. Their final resting place does not bear
their name, their loved ones unable to know where they lie, other than
this battlefield, hill, thicket or pasture. And as time has passed,
it has erased the scars where once men fought and died, nature will have
its way in restoring and obscuring even the deepest wounds to the earth.
At the close of the war,
William's family left Pennsylvania forever, never to return. They
went first to Iowa and two years later arrived in Pierce County, WI where
they would spend the rest of their lives. It must have been hard for
Rebecca to leave William and his sister, Mary, a young child who died at
age 3, behind. But she left many family members to care for their
graves and remember in the years to come, as she must have. I have
not been able to visit William's grave in Emporium, PA, nor do I know that
I ever will, but I hope that he somehow knows, that even 138 years after
his death, someone remembers him, wonders about him, thanks him for the
sacrifice he made.
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