A Tompkins County Civil War Love StoryNew Exhibition Opens At The NYS Museum

tarbell_portraitsAn exhibition featuring a Civil War love story, I Shall Think of You Often: The Civil War Story of Doctor and Mary Tarbell, opened Saturday, March 30, 2013 at the New York State Museum.

The exhibit focuses on the life and marriage of Doctor and Mary Tarbell of Tompkins County, New York, during the Civil War. The exhibition is presented in conjunction with An Irrepressible Conflict: The Empire State in the Civil War, a 7,000-square foot exhibition commemorating the sesquicentennial of the Civil War. Both exhibitions are open through September 22, 2013. Read more

Carol Kammen: Upstate Women in the Civil War

Though war was &#8220no place for a woman,&#8221 many New York state women during the Civil War set off from their homes to nurse the sick and wounded. One of the projects sponsored by the Tompkins County Civil War Commission is to honor women from the county who went to war.

The Army set regulations for nurses. They were to be women between the ages of 35 and 50- they needed to be persons of experience, good conduct, superior education, serious disposition and good health. They were to be neat, orderly, sober, industrious and be willing to travel with a small amount of luggage. Their dress was to be plain, brown, gray or black, with no ornaments. They would be paid 40 cents a day or $12 a month in addition to food, housing, and transportation.

Not all women who nursed met these standards and most encountered mistrust from a number of quarters, including doctors and quartermasters and by the public who feared they might be more &#8220temptress than nurse.&#8221 The sick and wounded, however, appreciated their presence and one reportedly said to a nurse, You are the &#8220God-Blessedist Woman I ever saw.&#8221

Among the first to go to war was Susan Emily Hall who enlisted as a nurse in April 1861. Hall, born in 1826, moved with her family to a farm in the Town of Ulysses where she grew up, one of a number of children. She stayed at home and cared for her parents in their old age but when both had died, she set off to New York City to study medicine with Dr. Elizabeth Blackwell. After the firing on Fort Sumter, Blackwell called for nurses and urged her students to enlist. Georgeanna Woolsey reported that two groups attended classes at New York Hospital where they learned &#8220how to make beds for the wounded, cook food properly for the sick, wash and dress wounds, and others things as they come along.&#8221

In July, Dorothea Dix called Hall and Dada, who came from Syracuse, to Washington. Dada has left a diary account of their experiences- both women served to the end of the conflict. Hall returned to New York state in the spring, her health strained- Dada remained in service until the fall of 1865.

Sarah Graham Palmer, a widow of 30 with two children, left in 1862 following the great enlistment of that summer to accompany her brothers who had enlisted in the NY 109th Volunteers. She commented that it was &#8220something to brave popular opinion, something to bear the sneers of those who loved their ease better than their country’s heroes, and who could sit down in peace and comfort at home, while a soldier’s rations, and a soldier’s ten for months and years made up the sum of our luxurious life.&#8221 [Aunt Becky’s Army Life (1867), page 2.] Palmer, who became known as &#8220Aunt Becky&#8221 by the troops, returned to Ithaca in 1865 where she married and emigrated to Iowa.

Sophronia Bucklin of Cayuga County also went to war in 1862 and served under the direction of Dix, working at a variety of military hospitals. She lived out the rest of her days in Ithaca. She too left a memoir of her experiences titled In Hospital and Camp: A Woman’s Record of Thrilling Incidents Among the Wounded in the Late War (1869).

Julia Cook heard of the need for nurses in the spring of 1864. Her husband had died in the war and her son had been wounded in battle but continued with his regiment. Cook went to Washington and began nursing but she soon fell ill and was sent home to Dryden.

Cook and Bucklin are buried in Tompkins County- Hall in California, Palmer in Iowa. These women were little honored in their lifetime- a flag pole was erected over Aunt Becky’s grave in DeMoines in 2009. It seems fitting that we remember them today as we commemorate the 150th anniversary of the Civil War.

By action of the Tompkins County Civil War Commission and the TC3 Foundation a fund was created to honor these women and provide aid to nursing students at Tompkins Cortland Community College in Dryden, New York. These will be named for Susan Emily Hall, Julia Cook, and Sarah Graham Palmer. A faculty enrichment grant will be named for Sophronia Bucklin. Donations to the Civil War Nurses Fund have come from all around the country.

Nurses came from all over the state. I have been collecting the names of women from New York who served and would be glad to post that list and add names of others to it.

Illustration: &#8220The Dying Soldier &#8211 The Last Letter From Home&#8221 by F. O. C. Darley, as it appeared in Mary A. Livermore’s My Story of the War (1888).

Carol Kammen is Tompkins County Historian, a Senior Lecturer at Cornell University, and the author of several books, including On Doing Local History: Reflections on What Local Historians Do, Why, and What It Means and The Peopling of Tompkins County: A Social History.

New York Historys New Contributor Carol Kammen

Please join us in welcoming Carol Kammen as our third new contributor here at New York History. Kammen is Tompkins County Historian, a Senior Lecturer at Cornell University, and the author of several books including On Doing Local History: Reflections on What Local Historians Do, Why, and What It Means and The Peopling of Tompkins County: A Social History.

Kammen has worked as a local historian for what she calls &#8220a great number of years,&#8221 teaching local history at Tompkins Cortland Community College and now at Cornell. She has researched and written about her area’s history in a weekly newspaper column, in Heritage, the magazine of the New York State Historical Association (NYSHA), and in several books.

She has lectured and written about the problems, joys, ethics, sources, and themes of local history, including a series of articles for NYSHA’s journal New York History (1980-1985) issued as Plain as Pipestem (Heart of the Lakes Press, Interlaken, NY). When the American Association for State and Local History asked her to write a book about the problems and possibilities of local history, the result was the now popular On Doing Local History.

Her first post, about upstate women in the Civil War, will appear later this morning.

Photo courtesy Jason Koski, Cornell University Photography.

Strengthening NYs Historical Enterprise

Anyone who follows this website, New York History: Historical News and Views From The Empire State, knows the close to astonishing amount of historical activity going on in our state. New York’s history, I believe, has more variety, interest, and potential for us to draw insights today, than the history of any other state. We have hundreds of historical programs and officially designated local historians. But we also know that the state of the historical enterprise is not as strong as it ought to be. Read more