Echoes Homeward

Once schoolmates, friends, and neighbors, soldiers came here from Yorkville, South Carolina; Pen Yan, New York; Clarksville, Virginia; Barre, Vermont; and a hundred other towns, North and South, and their deaths in these woods on May 5 and 6, 1864 devastated families and communities hundreds of miles away. In Birmingham, Pennsylvania, outside Pittsburgh, Almira Patterson learned of the death of her husband in these woods through a letter from one of his subordinate officers. The death of Colonel John W. Patterson plunged Almira into a struggle from which she would never fully recover. A widow with three children, she received a pension of just $350 per year, and the Orphan's Court of Allegheny County required her to sell her home to support the family. She never remarried and died in 1910. The Pattersons' young daughter Mary died of scarlet fever in 1868, adding to her mother's woe. In Yorkville, South Carolina, a long, mournful blast of a train whistle announced the arrival of war news in May 1864, and Caroline Harper Jamison Jenkins, wife of Confederate General Micah Jenkins, gathered with dozens of other townspeople at the train station to hear the latest. Her husband had been killed along the Orange Plank Road on May 6. With four young boys to raise and without income, Caroline moved nearer to family on Edisto Island, then earned a living tutoring young girls. She later opened a boarding house. Although only 26 when her husband died, Caroline never remarried.

Lake Wilderness, Virginia · United States