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(bright orchestral music) - Hello, welcome to "Illinois Stories."

I'm Mark McDonald in Quincy at Woodland Cemetery, in front of the Civil War memorial.

In this cemetery, there are an impressive number of people who had a significant role in the Civil War.

And there's a local group that wants to make sure that these people are remembered.

And, Beth Young, this has been going on for several years and I say it's impressive because some of these people that had significant roles in the Civil War, they're buried here, but in some cases, their headstones are not found, they may be degraded, sometimes there's no signage as to what role these people play.

- Exactly, Mark.

- And your group wants to bring this to the public's attention.

- Right, and we've been at it a number of years, we started actually the Civil War Roundtable.

Tri-State Civil War Roundtable started the project in 2012 and then have since been joined by the Historical Society of Quincy and Adams County.

- And so what you do is you find this information about these individual, you find the graves, and then you raise the money to introduce these people to the public.

- It's all paid for by private donation.

- And it's been easy to find the money because people are so generous.

And this is an important thing.

We have lots of of Civil War related stones in the cemetery.

- Yeah, so you locate them, you get the plaque or the headstone made, you install it, and then your group goes on and you say, well, there are others that we need to recognize.

- That's exactly right.

- So, you're looking to the future as well.

- Right, and we work also, I should point out with Harrison Monuments here in Quincy.

They are very, very, very good help.

I mean, they give us a real price break and I can't tell you how pleasant they are to work with.

But they've done all the historical markers that we've installed.

- You've done five, you're gonna do another, sixth one this year and then you would like to continue to do even more of those, wouldn't you?

- Right, our goal, sort of slow in starting here but our goal is to do two a year.

And this will be our sixth coming up on May 12th.

- Yeah.

- It's Louise Maertz, she was a Civil War nurse.

She was stationed at Vicksburg and at Jefferson Barracks in St. Louis and help build a hospital in New Orleans for Civil War wounded and sick.

- Well, what we're gonna do during this program, with your help and with the help of the people on your committee, is learn more about these six individuals that you're recognizing and find out why they were significant.

- Exactly.

- Okay.

Thank-you.

- Yeah.

Wonderful.

- Arlis, the most recent person that we're gonna recognize from Civil War history here is Louise Maertz.

Is that the right pronunciation?

- Correct.

- What made her special?

- Well, she, her whole life was devoted to philanthropy and others and good works.

I guess you could say, which very much surprised me when I first started studying her 'cause you think of 19th century women as not being very adventuresome.

But she traveled to Europe by herself.

She traveled to Cuba.

She traveled to Mexico.

- [Mark] Wow.

- She taught, she wrote a book, she wrote two books and she was a Civil War nurse for quite some time.

- How did a person become a Civil War nurse?

Did you just, you had to be a qualified nurse, I guess?

- No.

- But then you just, Oh, you didn't have to?

- No.

You didn't.

- You just wanted to have to help.

- Right.

- Okay.

- You just wanted to have to help.

And many, many, many of the nurses were volunteers who had no criteria at all.

Louise was actually appointed a nurse by a representative of Dorothea Dix who was the person in charge of appointing army nurses and he appointed her a nurse in St. Louis about 1862.

She had previously been nursing in Quincy at the Civil War hospitals.

So her first post was Helena, Arkansas where she was the only female nurse.

- Oh my goodness.

- And that story is repeated many times throughout her nursing career.

- That was a brutal, brutal thing to have to do because men were just coming in, in horrible condition.

- Correct.

- If coming in at all.

- Correct.

- And the sanitation was poor, and the medication was poor.

So she really, to stay with it that long, she had to have a terrific heart.

- And if you read about her in some of the articles, they all say she was in poor health her whole life.

I don't see how she could have been in poor health whole life if she went from Helena, and then she came back to this area bringing patients back with her on riverboats then the next place she goes is Vicksburg.

And that was a terrible mess as we all know.

And I just wanted to read a quote of what she said about Vicksburg if that's okay.

- Yeah, by all means, yeah.

- She said, "Had there been any fear in my composition, I could easily have found an excuse.

I was apparently the only woman on those hills alone in the care of an ambulance driver whose face I had not seen.

But a woman who fears is no more fit to be a nurse than a man who fears is fit to be a soldier."

So there she was once again by herself and she rides with the doctors and some of the other soldiers to go see the battleground and then she talks about riding again on a horse and she says how sore her legs were because she was using a man's saddle but she went to see the expert after it had been defeated and people were streaming out.

And of course in those days, they were called Confederates and contraband.

The contraband were the former slaves.

- So here we are in Woodland with her headstone and also with now an explanation of why she was special.

- Yes, and she did things after the war.

She taught for the Freedmen's Bureau.

She served in New Orleans where she set up a soldiers home.

She served at Jefferson Barracks where she took care of Andersonville prisoners.

And then when I went to the national archives and I was looking her up in DC, it says very clearly on her paperwork, accepted no pension.

- Wow!

- It was very important to her that she work free.

- Yeah, Thank you, Arlis.

- You're welcome.

Thank you.

She's a wonderful woman.

- Reg Ankrom, William A.Richardson is in Woodland Cemetery.

And he's been one of the recipients of one of these upgraded tombstones.

Why was he, what was so significant about him?

- He was a follower.

He was really the protege of Stephen A. Douglas who was from Quincy as well, who became the most powerful Democrat in the mid part of the 19th century.

When Douglas introduced the Kansas-Nebraska Act, he passed it in the Senate and it was William Richardson whom he got to take his position in the House of Representatives in 1847 when Douglas was elected to the Senate by the Illinois legislature who passed it in the House where the struggle was even greater and Richardson's political acumen got it passed there.

It's interesting that Abraham Lincoln called the Kansas-Nebraska Act, the proximate cause of the US Civil War.

And if that's the case, it meant that two men from Quincy, Stephen Douglas, who lived at third in New York and William Alexander Richardson who lived at third in Broadway, who sponsored the bill that became the approximate cause according to Lincoln of the US Civil War.

- That's kind of hair-raising when you think about it.

- It is.

- If it's true (laughs).

- Yeah.

- Now this man, William A. Harrison, he had a lot of roles.

He was a us Senator, he was a speaker of the House of Representatives.

Isn't that right?

- In the Illinois legislature.

- And with Douglas, of course, they may have teamed up to be the most powerful pair of politicians at the time.

- They were unique pair.

Richardson actually benefited from Douglas' first bill.

Douglas took a bill to the legislature, got it passed, which changed the way state's attorneys were appointed in Illinois in 1834.

And instead of the governor appointing them, the new law had the state legislature appoint them.

And Douglas gets himself, he's, Douglas is 21 years old, by the way, and was told just a few months earlier, he didn't know enough law to practice in Illinois.

Now he gets himself appointed, he's the state's prosecutor for the largest judicial district in Illinois.

And his friend, William Richardson, he got a job in the east part of the state as the state's attorney there.

So from that point on, Richardson followed the coat tails of Stephen Douglas and was very much the sympathetic supporter of Stephen Douglas throughout both of their careers.

- And to wrap this up, in the end, when Lincoln was president and was conducting the war, Richardson was a powerful man who opposed him every step of the way, didn't he?

- Yes, he was a democratic statesman and he was the loyal opposition to President Lincoln's execution and prosecution of the US Civil War.

- [Mark] Thank you.

- Sure.

- Rob Mellon, James Morgan is also buried at Woodland Cemetery.

The headstone, the monuments here, but we had a nice little, a plaque here to tell what he did.

What did he do?

- Well, the interesting thing is he came from Boston.

And 1810 is when he was born.

His dad was a sea captain.

So he was 16 years old, kind of followed his dad into that business and he ended up at sea and he was gonna go on this three year track out to the East Indies.

About a month into that voyage, he gets involved in a mutiny.

He wasn't one of the mutineers but he then gets marooned off onto this little lifeboat and they're at sea for like two weeks.

He ends up in Brazil, makes his way back to Boston.

He's still a young man.

And then in 1834, he comes to Quincy.

He starts out as a cooper.

And he knew that trade from when he was just a young boy and then he gets involved in the grocery business for a while and then the pork packing industry for a while.

And that's what he did.

But at the same time then he's involved with the militias, the Quincy Rifles and the Quincy Grays.

And so for every event or issue that they had, they call up these militia men.

So he was involved in what they called the Mormon Wars in 1844 in Hancock County.

He was a man, mounted rifleman at that time and then in the Mexican War in 1845, he was a captain when he was in the Mexican War, but he was with Zachary Taylor distinguished himself at the battle of Bueno Vista and that's how he got his rank to major.

That followed, that trend followed throughout his career.

He got all of his, he wasn't a political general.

He didn't have political connections.

Similar to General Prentiss, He didn't have those connections.

So everything was just by basically, hard fighting and the love by his soldiers, and in the Civil War, he's in, so he's part of that 90 day enlistment.

And when they do the 90 day enlistment, he breaks his leg.

So when the soldiers go down to Cairo, they're from this area, he can't go.

When that 90 days expires he does another enlistment then he makes his way down to Cairo and he's involved in all those efforts to try to clear the Mississippi for that traffic down there.

Well, the major battles he's involved in down there are New Madrid or, New Madrid and then Island Number 10 that was where he really distinguished himself.

He was a colonel at that time.

So once he distinguishes himself at Island Number 10, he gets his promotion to brigadier general.

At this point, he's starting to be recognized by people and even in Washington.

It was Orville Hickman Browning.

He wasn't a political guy.

And then at times, he had been known as a Douglas Democrat but then Orville Browning helps him get his promotion to major, or a brigadier general.

So he had those types of connections.

It was all just hard work, beloved by his men.

He would wear a private's uniform in many cases, similar to what Grant did.

I don't know if there was that connection with Zachary Taylor and they were just influenced by that, he would pick up a shovel and help bury his soldiers, truly beloved by his men.

Goes to Tennessee, Missionary Ridge, Chattanooga.

He's under Rosecrans, he's under, initially it was Pope, then Rosecrans, then Thomas, then he ends up under the command of General Sherman, then to Atlanta, which was tough.

A lot of Quincy is actually a part of that group.

And then to the March to the Sea, the Savannah campaign.

And then he really distinguishes himself at the Battle of Bentonville in North Carolina, which is part of that trek of Sherman's up through the Carolina's that's when he gets his promotion to major general.

He then ends the war.

He's in Louisville at the time in August of 1865, and that's when he's mustered out, comes back to Quincy and gets involved in the banking industry.

Very distinguished at that point, very recognizable.

He's involved in all kinds of business efforts.

- And brings his sword with him.

- He brings a sword.

- This was in the collection of the historical society.

- It's in the collection of historical society, it's just absolutely beautiful.

- [Mark] Can you pull it out for us?

- I can, this was actually given to him in 1863.

- [Mark] Oh, wow.

- So if you'd like to, - [Mark] It's beautiful.

- See this sword.

- [Mark] That is a wonderful catch for you guys to have that.

- Yeah, isn't that amazing?

And this is just a testament to his service.

We have a quote from Shelby Foote down there that's pretty amazing.

It's like, he was just a work horse and he earned all of his rank just by sheer hard fighting.

- Yeah.

- And he's... - Yeah.

- He was a very distinguished person afterwards.

He was on the board of directors for several businesses, railroads.

He was... - Rob, I've got to cut it here, - Sure.

- Because we have more places to visit.

- Absolutely.

- I wanna thank you for all the insights.

- Absolutely.

Yeah.

We can talk about General Morgan all day, right?

(Mark and Rob laughing).

- Jim Ross, there was one William Hall Dallas who was a police officer, a Black police officer in Quincy and we think the first Black police officer in the state of Illinois.

And when you all were looking to honor this man, there were no headstones here.

You didn't know where the graves were.

Is that right?

- That is absolutely correct.

- What'd you do?

- Well, I first started with his picture and then I got in, somebody's got to give this guy something about his life story.

- Yeah.

- So I started researching it and researching it, where he went and all this church stuff and I just got books and information.

- Yeah.

- All over, but.

- How did you find the graves though?

- I went through the archives here at the Woodland Cemetery.

- Yeah.

- And Eric Bruns, he's just a champion of helping and we found the location and the stones could have been there, maybe down deep, if they sank, they could have been a small stone but we knew something was in there.

And then we had sonic techniques to cover the area of that particular plot.

And there's graves in there.

There's three graves in there that we know for sure.

- [Mark] Yeah.

Yeah And so you decided, well, his wife is buried here too but there was no headstone for her, either.

- No, there was not.

She got married seven years after Alex's death.

And it was hard to find, tracking her down.

But I did.

She had married a minister that was here in town, the AME Church and they moved to Indiana.

Then when she died, I went through, find a grave on the internet and found out that, where she had died, researched that called there and got the obituary in Indiana and learned that she was brought back to Quincy.

And that she was buried here within the cemetery.

- Well, you all do wonderful work.

I mean, this is a great honor for people who deserve it.

- And he certainly did, he'd give his life and that's the only thing we really own other than the memories that others have gave us there.

I thought it was a great, it was the greatest thing that, I've enjoyed doing that since I retired from the PD here.

- Thanks Jim.

- Pleasure is mine, sir.

Thank you for your work, and I often watch your show.

- Well, thank you (laughs).

- I love them.

- Rich Keppner, Martin Hawkins is one of the dead people in Woodland Cemetery that deserved more explanation.

- He certainly does.

- Yeah.

- He certainly does.

- And so when people come by here and they can read a little bio about him, but what was it about his role in the Civil War that merited him this explanation?

- Well, he was a member of the 33rd Ohio Infantry and a civilian.

James Andrews, got this idea that if he could get enough volunteers they could disguise themselves as all as civilians go in small groups, rendezvous down at Marietta, Georgia, steal a locomotive and bring it back up north, headed for Chattanooga and tear out the railroad bridges along the way.

- That's a gutsy plan.

- Very gutsy.

This was early in the war, April of '62 shortly after the Battle of Shiloh.

So the south was still extremely Confederate.

And so it was a gutsy plan.

But they said they were willing to try it.

So off, they went in April, split up in small groups unfortunately, Hawkins and his buddy, he was traveling with, got there a little bit too late.

The train was already leaving.

So they missed the train.

They literally missed the train and were captured almost immediately.

Eventually, all the raiders were captured, but, and then they were put in a prison in Chattanooga, Tennessee and they were moved to a Confederate prison in Atlanta.

In October of '62, some of them decided they were gonna break out and Hawkins was one of those who did and along with a buddy there, Dorsey, they made their way through the Confederate lines about 200 miles north back to Kentucky.

And then the government decided since this was such a gutsy thing they had done, these guys deserve the Congressional Medal of Honor.

So that's what's significant about Martin Hawkins.

He was one of the early recipients of the Congressional Medal of Honor.

- Terrific.

That's a great story.

- Great story, isn't it?

Great story, yes.

- Dr. Tim Jacobs, you were probably sort of sympathetic with this man.

He was a doctor himself.

And May, I guess we understand that he would have been the first surgeon that died in the Civil War?

- Died in battle.

- Died in battle - In the Civil War.

- In the Civil War.

- Okay, tell us about him a little bit.

- Well, actually we're kindred spirits because we're both physicians.

And also, because I have a great love of history, both local and national, and he was a soldier in the Civil War.

He was part of a very interesting family, the Everett family.

His father's cousin was a man named Edward Everett.

And he did something in the Civil War very interesting.

Nobody knows about it.

He gave the two hour warm-up for Lincoln's Gettysburg address which lasted four minutes.

- [Mark] That's right.

I do remember reading about him (laughs).

- And even he said, if I could have hit the point in two hours that he did in two minutes.

And so I think we could probably not remember anything that Everett said that day but we certainly know the few lines that President Lincoln so succinctly put it that day.

- That is interesting.

Now, in fact, this headstone and this whole area here is interesting because he's, Everett's not buried here, is he?

- He is not buried here.

And there's a whole story to that that I think I'll get to in just a little bit but just a little bit about Sam Everett.

His family moved to Quincy in 1840 and he was interested in medicine.

He studied medicine locally, but he also went to St. Louis and he went to the east coast to study medicine.

And in fact, he was on the first faculty at Georgetown University and he taught anatomy.

But by 1861, when the Civil War started, he had a very thriving practice here.

He had a younger wife and a small child but when the first shots were fired at Fort Sumter, he was one of the first to raise his hand and volunteer for President Lincoln's new army.

And so he became the surgeon for the 10th Illinois Infantry Regiment but he worked his way up very quickly because the medical corp was so small.

And about a year later, he was the division surgeon for the second division under Benjamin Prentiss who was a general who was also from Quincy, Illinois.

Well, he found himself in that April of 1862 at a place called Pittsburgh Landing, which we now more know as Shiloh.

And the battle that day did not go well for the union army and they were pushed back to a place called the Hornet's Nest.

And it was called the Hornet's Nest because the bullets and the cannonballs were flying so, so fast that it sounded like the buzzing of hornets.

And the men were exhorting him to go back where it was safer, but he saw his men falling there.

And this says that he was tending his men right there when he was shot and killed instantly.

And again, he was the first physician killed in battle.

There would be somewhere between 36 and 40 physicians killed in battle but Sam Everett was the first.

And so he is buried at Shiloh.

- Okay, and this marker which had been put up by his family, this one that looks old and is old actually was in pretty bad shape before your group came along.

- [Tim] It was.

And so that was one of the reasons that we wanted to do something to commemorate him.

And so we had this redone and we had our own little rededication on the sesquicentennial piece of his death.

And so, it's a good reminder to us.

His brother, Edward Everett went down to try and bring his body back but he could not secure a metal vault.

And at that time, if you couldn't do that you couldn't really take the remains because they were not embalmed.

- [Mark] Yeah.

- And so he did, his brother, Everett or Edward Everett, he did have a diary which we have and it tells all about the trip of him going to Shiloh and trying to regain the body.

And he even drew a little picture of the tree next to the grave, wherever it is at Shiloh.

And so we do have that at our historical society.

- Well, this is wonderful work that you all do.

And its, people think that, they think history is not alive, but as long as people keep it alive, that's, it is, they can do it.

- We need to know the history or we may have to live it again.

- Yeah.

Thank you, Doc.

- You bet.

Thank you, Mark.

- This, I also wanna say that they do wonderful work.

They've done six of these monuments now and they wanna do two more each year for others that need to be recognized from their significance to the Civil War.

Also recognize the American Legion Post 37, they provide the salute at these ceremonies.

With another Illinois story in Quincy, I'm Mark MacDonald.

Thanks for watching.

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