After the firing on Fort Sumter, President Abraham Lincoln called on the remaining Union states to raise 75,000 troops, and in Martin County Nathan Kimball organized a recruitment meeting in Loogootee that drew more than 100 volunteers into the Martin County Guards, which became Company C of the 14th Indiana Infantry Regiment alongside nine other southern Indiana companies. Entering Union service in June 1861, these men from Hindostan Falls, Mt. Pleasant, and Loogootee went to war bound by family ties, religious training, and devotion to preserving the Union, and over the next three years they fought in many major eastern-theater engagements. They helped secure the Union success at Cheat Mountain, routed Stonewall Jackson at Kernstown, endured heavy fire at Antietam before joining the assault that broke the Confederate position, and earned from their division commander the title Gibraltar Brigade for their courage. At Gettysburg they repulsed assaults on Culp’s Hill and supported the defense of Cemetery Ridge during Pickett’s Charge, and near the end of their enlistments they repulsed Lee’s counterattacks at the Wilderness and took part in the successful assault on his army at Spotsylvania. The regiment mustered out in June 1864 and returned home, where veterans resumed civilian life, denounced antiwar dissidents called Butternuts or Copperheads, and joined the Grand Army of the Republic after 1866 to hold reunions and honor fallen comrades. In Martin County, remembrance continued through the Thomas J. Brooks GAR Post 322, formed in 1889 and host of the 1895 regimental reunion in Loogootee, helping preserve the memory of the Indiana 14th as the veterans’ numbers dwindled until the death of Isaac Crim, the last Martin County Guards veteran, in 1938; in June 2014, Martin County citizens marked the 150th anniversary of the company’s return home and honored its service and sacrifice.