General James C. Veatch was born in Harrison County, Indiana, on December 19, 1819, and died at Rockport on December 21, 1895. After teaching one term of school in Luce Township in 1838, he moved to Rockport, married Eliza Jane Anderson in June 1839, and taught at the Rockport seminary in 1839 and 1840. In 1841 he left teaching for public office, first being elected constable and then becoming the first county auditor, serving until 1855. He was the first Republican nominee for Congress in Indiana's First District in 1856, was elected to the state legislature from Spencer County in 1860, and served as a delegate to the national convention that nominated Abraham Lincoln. In 1843, with A. W. Jones, he founded the Indiana Herald, a Whig newspaper that they edited and published until the summer of 1845, and in 1878 he wrote a county newspaper history published by R. S. Hicks in the Rockport Gazette. He was secretary of the Rockport and Gentryville plank road company, which built a road as far as Centerville in 1850 and operated it as a toll road until 1857, was a shareholder in the Rockport bank when it was organized in 1854, and helped begin the movement to build the Rockport Collegiate Institute. He also joined or helped found several fraternal and veterans' organizations, including Spencer Lodge No. 140, Independent Order of Odd Fellows, Rockport Lodge No. 112 of the Masons, Spencer Post of the Grand Army of the Republic, and Rockport Lodge No. 107, Knights of Pythias. At the outbreak of the War of the Rebellion, he was appointed mustering officer and supervised the recruiting, mustering, and drilling of twelve or fifteen militia companies in Spencer and adjoining counties. He commanded a brigade in the assault on Fort Donelson, was appointed brigadier general after Shiloh, was seriously wounded at Hatchie River, was advanced to major general after Mobile, and near the close of the war became military governor of Memphis, Tennessee. A thirty-pound Parrot gun used in the siege of Vicksburg was presented to him by the government. After his death, a special train from Evansville brought about one hundred comrades and friends to his funeral, and he was buried at Sunset Hill Cemetery with military honors. His home was later turned into the Spencer County Orphanage, and in 2013 his home site was being used for trash collection.