Bonnie Cook brings us today a poignant and seriously touching article about women that time and history have all but forgotten. Thanks to Bonnie, that all might change. Memorial Day is a time for remembrance....as we have taken the time in recent past to acknowledge the brave women who were battlefield nurses in such conflicts at Vietnam, let us also remember the women who were true mavericks and were battlefield nurses during the Cival War....Read the article....
No one sent them. They volunteered to go.
Leaving behind more quiet lives, a handful of Montgomery County women answered the call for civilians to nurse Union Army wounded during the U.S. Civil War.Between 1862 and 1865, they trekked in plain dress, with hair pulled back, to battlefields in Pennsylvania, Maryland and the South. They had scant training or supplies, yet managed to care for the hurt and comfort the dying.
"The Brigade Surgeon has assured me more than once, that far more lives of the wounded soldiers have been spared thro' the tender nursing of our ladies than by the skill of all the surgeons," the husband of a nurse wrote in 1862.
Tomorrow, for what is believed to be the first time, one will be honored.
Michelle Harris, executive director of the Historical Society of Montgomery County, will lay flowers on the headstone of Elizabeth J. Brower, a civilian nurse who died in 1919 and lies buried among the buttercups in Montgomery Cemetery in Norristown.
During an 11 a.m. Memorial Day ceremony, Harris plans to "say a few words about [Brower's] service to the wounded men, and how her nursing of them typifies the sacrifice of many Montgomery County civilian nurses."
Plans are also afoot to obtain a headstone for Sarah Priest of Bridgeport, a civilian nurse who lies in an unmarked grave at Christ (Old Swedes) Church in Upper Merion. The grave was found using burial records.
Starting after the Battle of Antietam in 1862, Brower, of Norristown, spent two years caring for the wounded in Sharpsburg, Md. She was helped by Priest, who stayed 10 months.
The pair gave out the bandages, linens and food that had been collected and sent by the Norristown Ladies' Aid Society.
"They were reliable, valuable, effective women," Anna Morris Holstein, who was there, wrote in her 1867 book, Three years in field hospitals of the Army of the Potomac.
Both the original manuscript and Holstein's letters sent home are in the archives of the Historical Society on DeKalb Pike in Norristown. The public can view them, but because they are crumbling, they must be handled with cotton gloves....She vividly describes nursing and cooking "in primitive conditions" near the battlefield....Before going to war, Holstein wrote, she "instinctively shrank" from the thought of seeing soldiers in such conditions.
But when her husband, an Army major, returned home saying "that men were actually dying for want of food, home comforts and home care . . . I hesitated no longer," she wrote.
Brower, known to friends as "Miss Lizzie," came to assist Holstein with washing the men, feeding them, dressing their wounds, and writing letters home to their loved ones.
"Among the wounded at Antietam, Gettysburg and in Virginia, her kind ministrations will be long remembered," Holstein wrote.
It is not known why, but Brower didn't fare well after leaving the war in November 1864, according to federal pension records. "She has been of unsound mind ever since, and is now confined in an insane hospital in Harrisburg, Pa.," the pension records show.
Brower remained there for 31 years and died at age 89. It's not known why she was committed in Harrisburg, rather than Norristown State Hospital closer to home. It's thought that she kept a diary, but it's missing.
Newspapers disagree about Priest's death. One reports that she died at 63 in the Montgomery County almshouse of paralysis, apparently destitute. Another says she died at home in Norristown, and was honored at a funeral by many who "covered her casket with floral tributes." There's no way to know the truth, but the absence of a headstone is telling.
Holstein went on to conduct speaking tours and help returning prisoners of war. Later, she successfully lobbied for George Washington's headquarters at Valley Forge to be set aside as a national memorial.
Holstein died on the last day of 1900 at 75. Her headstone bears her signature.
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