My husband and five brothers joined the Confederate army from my old home in Alabama, and I was left with six small children to support. My husband was severly wounded at Shiloh, where so many Arkansas soldiers lost their lives. My husband, B.M. Pollard, joined Company D., Twenty-second Alabama regiment in 1861, and surrendered at Raleigh, N.C., in 1865. He was in the battles of Shiloh, Vicksburg, Chickamauga, Stone Mountain, Murfreesboro, and others, almost all the time under General Joe Johnston. He died five years after the close of the war. I am now 69 years old and a widow for 38 years. In 1881 we moved to Woodruff county, Arkansas.
I had a hard time in the war period, as the Northern soldiers took everything that I had or destroyed what they could not carry off. They emptied my feather beds and pillows and killed my cows and hogs, leaving me nothing. How little those rough soldiers thought of the hardships they were inflicting upon women and children. If they imagined such cruel privations as they generally forced upon Southern women would have the effect of discouraging them from working in the aid of the Confederacy, they were sadly mistaken. Our soldiers acted bravely on the field of battle and we women tried to be worthy of them.