Following the end of their service to the nation during the American Civil War and the early days of the Reconstruction era, the surviving members of the 47th Pennsylvania Veteran Volunteer Infantry were given honorable discharge paperwork from the United States Army that freed them to resume their old lives by returning home to their communities in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. That paperwork also empowered a surprisingly large number of 47th Pennsylvanians to begin life anew by migrating to the heartland of the United States or one of the nation’s border areas in search of greater prosperity and peace.

Westward Migration

One of the primary forces drawing 47th Pennsylvania Veteran Volunteers to the West was the availability of land that could be easily obtained at minimal to no immediate cost — with any payments that they might eventually be required to make deferred for periods of time that were, theoretically, long enough for them to earn the money needed to pay their bills. Made possible by the passage of the Homestead Act by the United States Congress in 1862, “any adult citizen, or intended citizen, who had never borne arms against the U.S. government” was allowed to “claim 160 acres of surveyed government land,” according to historians at the U.S. National Archives and Records Administration.

Claimants were required to live on and ‘improve’ their plot by cultivating the land. After five years on the land, the original filer was entitled to the property, free and clear, except for a small registration fee. Title could also be acquired after only a six-month residency and trivial improvements, provided the claimant paid the government $1.25 per acre. After the Civil War, Union soldiers could deduct the time they had served from the residency requirements.

“By 1890,” according to the United States Senate Historical Office, “the federal government had granted 373,000 hometeads on some 48 million acres of undeveloped land.”

The 47th Pennsylvania Volunteers and their relatives who obtained land in this manner would likely have paid individual filing fees of roughly ten to fourteen dollars “to claim the land temporarily,” plus an additional two to four dollars in commission fees to their respective land agents, according to historians at the U.S. National Park Service and newspapers of the 1870s. Those same 47th Pennsylvanians or their relatives then became farmers on the land they had claimed. In hindsight, many of those plots were located on ground that had been taken away from Native Americans. Although the Dawes Act of 1887 “designated 160 acres of farmland or 320 acres of grazing land to the head of each Native American family” and “the tribes controlled the land now being allotted to them … much of the land subject to the Dawes Act was unsuitable for farming,” according to National Park Service historians.  As a result, “large tracts were leased to non-Native American farmers and ranchers.” In addition, [a]fter the Native American families claimed their allotments, the remaining tribal lands were declared ‘surplus'” and “given to non-Native Americans.”

Native American lands decreased significantly under the Dawes Act. Reservation lands went from 138 million acres in 1887 to 48 million aces in 1934 … a loss of 65 percent, before the Dawes Act was repealed.

The Dawes Act, however, was not the only contributing factor in that sweeping redistribution of land. According to Homesteading the Plains: Toward a New History, while “homesteading was an important driver of dispossession” in the Dakotas and Oklahoma, “the primary drivers of dispossession” in Colorado and Montana, “were mining interests, railroads, land speculators, and big cattle ranchers with homesteading playing a very minor role.” And in Nebraska, “forces other than homesteading produced virtually all dispossession.”

Veterans of the 47th Pennsylvania who migrated west and became farmers or millers after the American Civil War included: William Ewing (Kansas), Reuben Shatto Gardner (Minnesota), Richard A. Graeffe (Michigan), George Dillwyn John (Illinois), Samuel Noss (Indiana), David C. Rose (Indiana), Lewis W. Saylor (Iowa), and James M. Sieger (Missouri).

Additional Forces Which Inspired 47th Pennsylvania Veteran Migration

A second force which motivated a number of 47th Pennsylvania Veteran Volunteers to relocate from the Great Keystone State to other areas of the United States was the expansion of America’s network of railroad lines throughout and beyond the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. Those expansion efforts ultimately led to the completion of The Transcontinental Railroad.

“It had taken the bloodshed and sacrifice of the Civil War to reunite the nation, North and South. But when the war was over, Americans set out with equal determination to unite the nation, East and West,” according to American History documentarian Stephen Ives.

To do it they would build a railroad. Its completion would be one of the greatest technological achievements of the age, signaling at last, as nothing ever has, that the United States was not only a continental nation, but on its way to becoming a world power.

And when the railroad was finally built, the pace of change would shift from the steady gait of a team of oxen, to the powerful surge of a steam locomotive. The West would be transformed.

Overnight, the railroad would turn barren spots of earth into raucous boomtowns…. The railroad would allow Civil War veterans, poor farmers from the East, and landless peasants from Europe to have a farm they could call their own. There they planted foreign strains of wheat in rich, matted prairie soil that had never known anything but grass…. Railroads would carry hundreds of thousands of western longhorns to eastern markets….

“Railroads had already transformed life in the East, but at the end of the Civil War, they still stopped at the end of the Missouri River,” according to Ives.

For a quarter of a century, men had dreamed of building a line coast to coast. Now, they would attempt it. One thousand seven hundred and seventy-five miles of track from Omaha to Sacramento. It would have to be cut through mountains higher than any railroad builder had ever faced, span deserts where there was no water anywhere, and cross treeless prairies where anxious and defiant Indians would resist their passage….

The West couldn’t be settled without railroads, and a railroad across the West couldn’t be built without the government. The distances were too great, the costs too staggering, the risks too high for any group of businessmen….

In 1862, Congress gave charters to two companies to build it. The Central Pacific was to push eastward from Sacramento, over the Sierra Nevada Mountains. The Union Pacific was to start from the Missouri, cross the Great Plains, and cut through the Rockies. Most companies were to receive vast loans from the Treasury as they went along — sixteen thousand dollars per mile of level track, thirty-two thousand in the plateaus, and forty-eight thousand in the mountains. Lobbyists got the rates doubled within a year….

Congress also promised each company sixty-four hundred acres of federal land for every mile of track it laid….

In Nebraska, some ten thousand men were at work on the Union Pacific, heading west. Most were immigrants from Ireland, but there were also Mexicans and Germans, Englishmen, ex-soldiers, and former slaves — an army of workmen, moving across the Plains with military precision….

Each rail weighed seven hundred pounds. It took five men to lift it into place. Two or three miles a day — every day. Six days a week — week in and week out.

Among the 47th Pennsylvania Volunteers or their families who found work in the railroad industry were: Atkinson Brady (Northern Central Railway, Pennsylvania), Edward L. Clark (unidentified Pennsylvania railroad company), John D. Colvin (engineer, Pacific Railroad; assigned to extend the line from Atchison, Kansas to Fort Kearney in Nebraska), Reily M. Fornwald (Reading Railway Company, Pennsylvania), John A. Gardner (fireman, Pennsylvania Railroad), Reuben Shatto Gardner (street car conductor, Seattle, Washington), Phaon Guth (section boss, Catasauqua and Fogelsville Railroad, Pennsylvania), Charles and Martin Hackman (Philadelphia and Reading Railroad, Pennsylvania), Daniel Oyster (railroad postal agent, unidentified company), Samuel H. Pyers (soldier stationed in Omaha, Nebraska with the U.S. Army’s 30th Infantry; assigned to guard a Union Pacific Railroad line that was under construction near Hot Springs; subsequently stationed in the Black Hills of South Dakota), Peter S. Reed (executive, Colorado Central Railroad, and a brother-in-law of Washington Alexander Power), and Charles H. Small (freight car manufacturing clerk, Harrisburg Car Manufacturing Company, Pennsylvania).

A third force driving the migration of 47th Pennsylvania veterans was the rapid growth of employment opportunities in the mining industry as coal and oil became standardized heating and lighting fuels for homes and businesses. “Rush fevers” also swept the nation as news reports of mineral and metal booms inspired thousands to stake claims on lands where they could prospect for gold and copper.

Veterans of the 47th Pennsylvania employed in the mining industry included: John D. Colvin (superintendent, Delaware & Hudson Coal Company and, later, the Lehigh Valley Coal Company, Pennsylvania), Reuben Shatto Gardner (gold prospector, Western United States and British Columbia, Canada), Martin Luther Guth (prospector and miner, New Mexico, Nevada and California), and Washington Alexander Power (copper smelter, Golden and Trinidad, Colorado).

In addition to securing jobs as farmers, railroad workers or miners, veterans of the 47th Pennsylvania and their descendants also pursued employment as bakers, bookkeepers, bridge builders and other carpenters (Thomas Burke and George Kosier, Iowa), cattlemen (Charles Marshall, Kansas and New Mexico), cigarmakers, civil engineers (H. B. Robinson and his son, Horace Brady Robinson, Jr.), clockmakers, firemen, hoteliers, ironworkers (Spencer Tettemer, Arkansas, after relocating from Missouri), janitors (William Schuyler Reiser, South Dakota), jewelers (Charles Bachman, Iowa), lumbermen, machinists, mechanics, newspaper publishers, an optometrist, painters, policemen, postmasters, quarrymen, restauranteurs, saloon owners, stone carvers, tailors, tanners, teamsters, tinsmiths (Franklin Sieger, Ohio), and watchmakers/repairmen (Elias Franklin Benner, Indiana, after working as a piano tuner in Ohio). A fair number owned their own small businesses.

Opting for a complete change, Theodore Mink, a whaler and coachmaker prior to the war, opted to “run off and join the circus” after receiving his honorable discharge paperwork. His post-war travels ultimately took him from Portland, Maine to San Bernardino, California and back.

At least three descendants of 47th Pennsylvania Volunteer Infantrymen made it as far west as Hawaii. Louise (Troell) Spreckels, a niece of John H. Troell, migrated to Kauai, where her husband Richard was employed as “head chemist at the Kilauea plantation” during the early 1920s. Her daughter and namesake, Louise Spreckels, subsequently became a teacher at the Koolau School in Kauai (in January 1924). And Corinne (Snyder) Johanos, a great-granddaughter of Timothy M. Snyder, became a resident of Honolulu, Hawaii circa the 1980s. A classically-trained pianist, Corinne Johanos served on the boards of directors of the Hawaii Opera Theater and the Honolulu Symphony Associates before relocating to Naples, Florida in 1997.

Health as Another Motivating Factor to Migrate

A fourth migration driver for former 47th Pennsylvanians was their persistent suffering from chronic conditions that had been caused by wounds received in battle or diseases that had sickened them during their Civil War service. For many, those mental and physical ailments were compounded by feelings of isolation, particularly for those who had never married or were estranged from their families. As a result of that particular factor, many 47th Pennsylvanians relocated to the northeast, southeast or westward, driven by their need for higher quality, more affordable healthcare and a renewed sense of camaraderie and community that could only be accessed in a city or town where one of the branches of the U.S. National Home for Disabled Volunteer Soldiers was located.

Among the 47th Pennsylvanians who were admitted to soldiers’ homes were: Benjamin Amey (Kansas and Illinois), David K. Bills and William R. Fertig (Virginia and then Ohio), William Brecht (Ohio), Washington Scott Johnston and Alfred Lynn (Tennessee), Charles Marshall (Kansas), Lawrence McBride and Edward Newman (Ohio), Jacob Petre (Ohio and Virginia), and John G. Tag (Kansas).

Martin Luther Guth, who resided at the Veterans’ Home of California in Yountville, Napa County circa 1900, was subsequently transferred to the National Soldiers’ Home in Tennessee before returning to California, where he lived alone in Oakland and volunteered with his local chapter of the Grand Army of the Republic (G.A.R.). James Downs, a former prisoner of war, spent his final years at the Pennsylvania Memorial Home in Brookville, Jefferson County, Pennsylvania.

Others, like Daniel Battaglia and Ephraim Clouser, were far less fortunate, requiring lengthy or permanent hospitalizations due to serious mental illnesses.

A fifth motivator appears to have been an odd desire for anonymity, as was the case with Private Joseph Slayer, who was known by various names after he settled in what is now the city of Bismarck, North Dakota (a place where he could forge new identities as “Dead Eye Dick” and “E. J. McMeeser” in the late 1880s).

Resettling in the South

At least four of the nine formerly enslaved Black men who enlisted with the 47th Pennsylvania during the American Civil War are confirmed to have resettled in America’s Deep South, following their respective honorable discharges from the regiment in Charleston, South Carolina during the fall of 1865.

According to records of the U.S. Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands, U.S. Census records of the late nineteenth century and U.S. Civil War Pension records, both Bristor Gethers and Thomas Haywood returned to South Carolina — the state where they had been enslaved prior to the American Civil War.

Gethers, who was mistakenly listed on the 47th Pennsylvania’s regimental rosters as “Presto Gettes,” was signed to a contract on 12 February 1868, with fourteen other Freedmen, by the Mt. Pleasant, South Carolina office of the Freedmen’s Bureau, which obligated the men to provide farm labor for the White House Plantation in Berkeley County, South Carolina. By 1870, he was residing with his wife and son in Beaufort Township, Beaufort County, South Carolina, where he was involved in farming land valued at fifteen hundred dollars (roughly the equivalent of thirty-four thousand U.S. dollars in 2022). Residents of Port Royal, Beaufort County by 1889, he and his wife made their home on Horse Island during their final years.

Haywood was also signed to labor contracts by the Freedmen’s Bureau between 1866 and 1868. In exchange for agreeing to plant and cultivate cotton for several men who had been plantation owners in the Beaufort, Berkeley and Mt. Pleasant areas of South Carolina, on three to five-acre parcels of land that had been leased to him by those men, he was allowed to keep portions of the sale of that cotton (the largest portions of which went to the former plantation owners who had likely been active participants in, and financial beneficiaries of, the Lowcountry’s system of chattel slavery prior to and during the Civil War). Treated for remittent fever by U.S. Freedmen’s Bureau physicians during this same period, he subsequently settled in Sheldon Township, Beaufort County and lived to witness the dawn of a new century.

Also according to Freedmen’s Bureau records, U.S. Census records of the late nineteenth century and U.S. Civil War Pension records, both Aaron French (known during enslavement as Aaron Bullard) and Hamilton Blanchard initially made their way north during or around the same time that other members of their regiment were returning home to Pennsylvania. Freed from slavery in Louisiana, they had enlisted with the 47th Pennsylvania with three other formerly enslaved men in Natchitoches, and had traveled with the regiment until they were honorably discharged in Charleston, South Carolina during the winter of 1865.

Freedmen’s Bureau records documented that both men were residents of Washington, D.C. by late January or early February 1866 and that, while there, both had met with representatives of the Freedmen’s Bureau. During that meeting(s), both agreed to commit themselves to a Freedmen’s Bureau labor contract, which obligated them to join a large group of formerly enslaved men, women and children in providing farm labor to a man named John P. Avrill (alternate spellings: “Averile,” “Averill,” “Arvile,” “Arville,” or “Avrille”) at his property in Canton, Madison County, Mississippi between 16 February and 16 December 1866.

Two years later, on 10 November 1868, J. H. Chapman, a sub-assistant commissioner employed by the Freedmen’s Bureau in Mississippi, penned a letter of inquiry to E. B. French, second auditor of the U.S. Department of Treasury in Washington, D.C., in which he asked to “be informed what decision has been made of the claim of Hamilton Blanchard, late of Co. “D” 47 Penn Vol. Inft., his discharge was received by J. R. Schuchard[?],” of the “Freedmen’s Aid Commission, March 15, 1866.” Stating that he was making that request on behalf of Blanchard “for the purpose of prosecuting his claim against the Gov.”, he added that he was also requesting “information concerning the claim of Aaron Bullard (Col.) who belonged to same company & regiment.”

That letter appears to indicate that Blanchard and French had lost touch with each other less than three months after agreeing to the Freedmen’s Bureau contract in Washington, D.C. Although little is known about Blanchard’s whereabouts after this time, researchers for 47th Pennsylvania Volunteers: One Civil War Regiment’s Story have been able to determine that Aaron French made a new life for himself and his wife and children in Issaquena County, Mississippi. His descendants now reside in multiple communities across America.

Other members of the regiment also chose to remain in, or return to, southern states where the regiment had been stationed during the war. One, Washington H. R. Hangen, was employed by the Freedmens’ Bureau to manage services for Black men, women and children in Louisiana’s St. Tammany and Washington parishes. After completing his assignment, Hangen found work as a surveyor in Louisiana and lived out the remainder of his life there.

Samuel Barber Woodring relocated to Sanibel County, Florida during the 1880s and lived on Sanibel Island until shortly before his death in Fort Myers, Florida.

Resettling in the Northeast

Closer to home, New Jersey benefitted from one of the largest, most sustained 47th Pennsylvania migrations with multiple members of the regiment choosing to settle in Phillipsburg, Warren County, including: John Diaz, Uriah Meyers, Francis J. Mildenberger, Eli Moser, George Reuben Nicholas, Peter Osterstock, John J. Paxton, and John J. Schofield. Others resided elsewhere in the state, including: Aaron Rader, George Rockafellow, Hugh Bellas Rodrigue, the Rev. William Rodrock, Thomas Rogers, Matthias Schmidt, Barnet Searfoss, Jefferson Stem, Andrew Thoman, and Oliver Van Billiard.

But Daniel K. Reeder, who lost an arm during the war, opted to settle in Dover, Delaware. A successful inventor, he also traveled regularly to and from Washington, D.C.

James Turner Rider, Sr. and David Livingston Sloan were two of the other 47th Pennsylvanians who moved closer to the nation’s capital. Rider resided in Baltimore, Maryland after the turn of the century, while Sloan lived in Elkton, Maryland.

Paul Strauss, on the other hand, apparently felt the need to remain on the East Coast, but be as far away from Washington, D.C. as possible. So, he relocated to Kennebec County, Maine during the 1870s, and found work as a carpenter. On 9 May 1882, he wed Lizzie Norton in the town of Waterville and became a farmer and father. By 1900, he and his family were living in Albion, Kennebec County. Following his death from heart disease at the U.S. National Home for Disabled Volunteer Soldiers in Togus, Maine in 1926, he was laid to rest beside his wife at the Albion Cemetery No. 4 in Albion.

Jenkin J. Richards was another of the 47th Pennsylvanians who moved to New England. An 1844 emigrant from Wales in the United Kingdom who subsequently settled in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania prior to the Civil War, he became an ironworker, post-war, after migrating to Massachusetts, and witnessed the dawn of a new century before passing away in Worcester, Worcester County in 1911.

Mathias Snyder settled in Albany, New York during the 1870s, where he was gainfully employed as a piano maker, while his son worked as a piano tuner.

* Roster of 47th Pennsylvania Veterans and Descendants Who Settled in Northeastern or Mid-Atlantic States

Residency in Non-U.S. Locations

Choosing to make their own marks even farther away, several veterans of the 47th Pennsylvania Volunteer Infantry or their siblings and descendants made lives for themselves outside of the United States, residing temporarily or permanently where they were employed in business, military or public service jobs. Among the most adventurous of these souls were: Walter Henry Brunell, who settled in Calgary, Alberta, Canada, where he was employed by the Husky Oil Co.; Margaret R. (Grant) Schutte, who settled in South Africa, where she had been appointed to the faculty of Transvaal University College (later the University of Pretoria); and Conrad Troell, who worked as a miner in Central America during the mid-1860s.

* Roster of 47th Pennsylvania Veterans or Members of Their Families Who Temporarily or Permanently Resided Outside of the United States

Making The Communities Where They Lived Better

Multiple veterans of the 47th Pennsylvania Volunteer Infantry and their descendants positively impacted the towns and cities they called home by pursuing public service careers. Among those leading the charge for improvements to government operations, public education and public safety in Pennsylvania were: John Peter Shindel Gobin, who was elected to the Pennsylvania State Senate before becoming a lieutenant governor of Pennsylvania, William M. Hendricks, who was elected as a city inspector and then as a justice of the peace in the Borough of Sunbury, and Conrad Volkenand, who was elected as the Luzerne County Recorder in 1880.

Aaron French, one of the nine Black soldiers mentioned above in “Resettling in the South,” was appointed as a delegate from Issaquena County, Mississippi to the Republican Congressional Convention for the Third District, which was held in Greenville, Mississippi on 7 August 1886.

Born into slavery in Mississippi, Aaron French had enlisted with the 47th Pennsylvania as “Aaron Bullard” after having been freed from continued enslavement near Natchitoches, Louisiana in April 1864, and had lived briefly in Washington, D.C. before returning to the Deep South to work, marry and begin a family. After resettling in Mississippi with his wife, he had become a farmer and land owner, had also become increasingly active, politically, and had inspired his descendants to become socially and politically active in their own communities.

His daughter, Jessie (French) Cobb (1876-1913), grew up to become a teacher in the public schools of Mayersville, Mississippi. One of his great-grandsons, Richard Henry Jones (1935-2001), became a medical research photographer with St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital in Memphis, Tennessee, and was also greatly respected for his efforts to create a photographic records of the history of the Civil Rights movement in Memphis.

John Albert (“Jack”) Snyder, a great-grandson of Corporal Timothy Matthias Snyder, rose through the ranks to become a lieutenant-colonel in the United States Air Force. Stationed in Förch, Baden-Württemberg, Germany, at the age of twenty-two, he was relocated by the Air Force for various duty assignments throughoit his career. Settling in Greenville, Mississippi during the early to mid-1950s and Burlington, Vermont during the late 1950s, he was then stationed at the Yokota Air Base in Tokyo, Japan during the early 1960s. Additional duty assignments that decade took him to in Korea and Vietnam. After serving again in Germany during the early 1970s, he subsequently returned to the United States, where he made his home in Killeen and Harker Heights, Texas during the 1980s and 1990s.

 

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