Camp Lima, commanded by Col. Isaiah Pillars, is shown in the autumn of 1862. The camp, on the east side of the Ottawa River roughly where Simmons Field stands today, opened in the summer of 1862 and was closed by November of that year as its functions were shifted elsewhere. In August 1862, according to the Lima Weekly Gazette, more than 1,600 men were at the camp. Both George Davison and James Doud Boyd began their service at the camp.
On April 17, 1861, five days after the start of the Civil War, the call to arms to put down the rebellion reached Lima in the form of a notice in the city’s Weekly Gazette newspaper.
“Volunteers who desire to enroll themselves for duty can do so at A.N. Smith’s Tin Shop, Cunningham & Myer’s Law Office or at John L. Hughes’ office. The rolls are now open, and ready for the receipt of names,” the notice read.
Allen County filled the rolls. A week after the notice, on April 24, 1861, the Gazette reported, “An immense crowd of people assembled at Ashton’s corner (northwest corner of Public Square) yesterday forenoon, where speeches were made, national songs sung and enlistments in companies of infantry rapidly made.”
Inside Ashton’s Hall that afternoon “the ladies of Lima set out a dinner to the volunteers … where some 150 or 200 brave men sat down to partake of the hospitality of the ladies, on the eve of departure for camp life.”
The following day, 103 men, mostly from Allen County, boarded a Dayton & Michigan train bound for Columbus. They comprised the first company of volunteers organized in Lima to fight in the Civil War.
Between the beginning of the war in April 1861 and the surrender of Confederate General Robert E. Lee at Appomattox Court House, Virginia, in April 1865, Allen County, with a population of slightly more than 19,000 in 1860, supplied almost 2,000 men to the regiments of the Union Army.
In letters and diaries, Allen County’s soldiers chronicled the tedium and terror of life in the Army, while the folks at home kept them apprised of events in the world they’d left behind. Many of those letters and diaries were donated to the Allen County Museum.
Samuel Bassett, who was born in Allen County and enlisted in the 27th Ohio Volunteer Infantry in January 1864, fought in battles around Atlanta and took part in Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman’s march through Georgia to the coast at Savannah in the fall and winter of 1864. On Dec. 23, 1864, he wrote to his parents from Savannah.
“Well Father we have had considerable of a time since I wrote to you last. We have traveled some 485 miles, and we have tore up 250 miles of railroads, and we also have had some pretty hard fighting to do. … You may think (it) strange, but it is as warm here now as it is up north in the summer time, and we have marched 25 and 30 miles a day and carried a big knapsack. If a fellow wants to learn to soldier, let him come down here and join Uncle Billy Sherman.”
On March 29, 1865, Bassett wrote from Goldsboro, N.C., that he “was not very well at the present time,” having had the “fever and ague for the last three weeks.” He added that he was detailed to tend the wounded. Of the nine wounded men in his care, he noted, six were missing legs.
“The(re) is one that has his right arm off closest to his shoulder, and one that is wounded five times twice in his right hand twice in his right arm between his elbow and shoulder and once in his left hand. His arm is not off, but it might as well be for it is shot into a jelly,” Bassett wrote.
By the end of April 1865, with the war over, Bassett, who was still ill, had been transferred to a hospital near Cincinnati.
“When we came through on the (train) cars, I could see farmers to work on their farms a planting corn,” he wrote April 28, 1865. “And I thought to myself I’d like to be a farmer once more.”
Bassett returned to farming near Beaverdam after being mustered out of the Army.
Many Allen County men mustered into the Union Army at Camp Lima, which was established in the summer of 1862 on the east bank of the Ottawa River roughly in the area where Simmons Field is located today. Although the camp was short-lived – closing by November 1862 as its functions were shifted elsewhere – more than 1,600 men were at the camp on Aug. 10, 1862, according to the Gazette.
One of the more prominent regiments formed at the camp was the 99th Ohio Volunteer Infantry, which fought in Tennessee and in Georgia. Among those serving in the 99th was George L. Davison, of Shawnee Township, whose wife wrote to him often about the situation both political and personal in the township.
Of particular concern to Margaret Boyd Davison on April 18, 1863, was the activity of Peace Democrats, known as Copperheads, who opposed the war and wanted an immediate settlement with the Confederates.
“There are lots of them in Lima sporting copperheaded canes, butternut breastpins bound with copper and children in the streets hurrahing for Jeff Davis (Jefferson Davis, the Confederate president). It just makes my blood boil to think of it,” she wrote.
Noting that “our Rev. Johnston” had voted with the Copperheads, she added, “I will not go to hear him if he should preach in the road opposite the house for at the present time our religion and country are inseparable companions.”
On March 10, 1864, she delivered sad news from the home front, writing that “we are being afflicted at home now such affliction as we never before had been participants. Doud’s wife died last Friday of smallpox.” Doud was James Doud Boyd, her older brother, who was serving with the 99th.
“We all sympathize with him in his sad bereavement,” she wrote. “He had been from home just four weeks to the day when she died.”
James Doud Boyd, who was mustered into the 99th at Camp Lima in August 1862, wrote of the rigors of Army life in a diary donated to the Allen County Museum. The diary entry for Dec. 5, 1864, reads: “Marched this morning at daylight, found the road strewn with wrecks of wagons and camp equipage also found corpses laying by the road-side where bushwhackers had attacked a train 12 hours ahead of us.”
George Davison resigned from the Army in July 1864 and, in 1869, he and Margaret moved to Illinois. James Doud Boyd left the Army in June 1865. He died in April 1916.
Jacob Early was a prolific letter-writer, and his wartime correspondence to his wife Sarah in Allen County was compiled in a book, “Letters Home: The Personal Side of the American Civil War.” The letters cover the period from September 1861, when Early was mustered into the Ohio Volunteer Infantry at Camp Dennison, near Cincinnati, to June 1865, when he was mustered out of the service at Columbus.
A deeply religious man, Early several times expressed misgivings about taking life. In a letter to his wife from Nashville, Tenn., on Dec. 16, 1864, he wrote of his qualms starting the letter, “Well, Sarah, I want to write some things that I don’t want anyone else to know anything about, not any thing bad but it concerns no one else but ourselves. It would do no harm, but it might make a heap of talk. I am in the Army now, and I may get home some day, and then I don’t want any such thing throwed up to me then. In the first place I am bound to live a Christian as much as I can in the Army, and I am bound to not fight or do violence to no man and to shun this.”
Nevertheless, Early would serve the Union in battles through Virginia, Tennessee, Georgia, Alabama and North Carolina. On April 10, 1865, a day after Lee’s surrender to Gen. Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox Court House, Early wrote to his wife from near Goldsboro, N.C., where he was with Gen. Sherman’s army.
“We have great and glorious news from Grant and the army is alive with cheers and ambition and courage,” he wrote. “We have a powerful army here, and we mean to clean out Confederacy as we go and be that far on our way home.”
Much changed over the next week. On April 14, 1865, President Abraham Lincoln was assassinated and, beginning on April 17, 1865, Confederate General Joseph Johnston began the process of surrendering the last major Confederate force east of the Mississippi River to Sherman near Durham, N.C.
“Everything is going off lovely,” Early wrote to his wife on April 19, 1865, “but the sad news of the death of our great chieftain and President of our United States was a great shock and his loss is to be mourned, and there is a great lamentation among the officers and men in this branch of the Army.”
Early was mustered out of the Army in July 1865 and returned to his farm near Blue Lick to rejoin his wife and 4-year-old daughter. He died Oct. 22, 1873.
SOURCE
This feature is a cooperative effort between the newspaper and the Allen County Museum and Historical Society.
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See past Reminisce stories at limaohio.com/tag/reminisce
Reach Greg Hoersten at [email protected].
