Albumen Cabinet Card of Abigail Hitchcock in widow’s weeds, circa 1872. Written on reverse: “Aunt Abby Hanks Hitchcock. Gubelman, 77 &79 Montgomery St., Jersey City.” Ann Longmore-Etheridge Collection.
Abigail Irena Hanks was born on 10 November, 1816, in Mansfield, Tolland County, Connecticut. She was the daughter of Rodney Hanks (1782–1846), a Mansfield, Connecticut, manufacturer of silk machinery, woolen goods, cannon swabs, and other machinery, and Olive Freeman (1783–1816). The extended Hanks clan were large-scale makers of silk, a business that had begun with the family importing English mulberry trees to Connecticut for the nurture of silkworms.
Abigail’s renowned uncle, Benjamin Hanks, cannon, bell, and clockmaker.
The Hanks family was also associated with the Meneely (Watervliet) foundry, which closed the mid-20th Century after more than a hundred years providing bells for various carillons and chimes throughout the Western hemisphere. The bell foundry was established 1826 in Gibbonsville, New York, on the west bank of the Hudson River, a few miles north of Albany, by Andrew Meneely, a former apprentice in the foundry of Benjamin Hanks (1755-1824), Abigail’s uncle, who is generally credited with being the first bronze cannon and church bell maker in the United States. Hanks is believed to have worked at a foundry connected with patriot Paul Revere and was a drummer during the Revolutionary War.
Mourning Brooch for Master Mariner Joshua Goodale, who died March 1850, aged 74. This gold-plated brooch has seen some rough handling. The plate is worn on the bezel surrounding the glass-capped compartment and the pin is missing. Ann Longmore-Etheridge Collection.
Joshua Goodale, master mariner, merchant, and agent for Salem Iron Company, was born on 1 November, 1775, in Salem, Essex County, Massachusetts, and died 3 March, 1850, in Boston, Suffolk County, Massachusetts.
He was the son of Joshua Goodale (1753-1795), a blacksmith, and Mary Henfield (1752-1821). His siblings were: Lydia (b, abt. 1782), who married Solomon Towne; she married, secondly, Hale Late of Newbury; Poll (b. abt. 1784); Thankful (b. abt. 1787), who married Nathan Green on July 15, 1813; Hannah (b. abt. 1790); and Nathan (b. abt. 1793).
Goodale was already an old name in Salem by the time of Joshua’s birth. Robert Goodale with his wife Katherine Killam and three children came from England on the ship Elizabeth in 1634. After immigrating to Massachusetts, the couple had six more children.
According to the Pickering Genealogy: Being an Account of the First Three Generations of the Pickering Family of Salem, Mass., by Harrison Ellery and Charles Pickering Bowditch, “Mr. Goodale began his business life in the counting-room of the eminent merchant William Gray, and, in 1794, was sent by him to the West Indies as a supercargo. He afterward became the agent for the Salem Iron Company, and at one time was in New Orleans in business. On the decline of trade in Salem, he moved to Boston.
“Mr. Goodale was a man of spotless character, very temperate, and even abstemious in his habits. His form was erect, and his gait elastic to the last, while he retained the manners of a gentleman of the old school. He was inclined to reprove the errors of others, but always without harshness, and in a way peculiar to himself. At the time of his death, Mr. Goodale was the oldest member of the Park Street Church, Boston.”
On 22 October, 1804, in Danvers, Essex County, Massachusetts, Goodale married Rebecca Page, the daughter of Captain Samuel Page (1753–1814) and Rebecca Putnam (1755–1838) of Danvers, the small village next to Salem. One of Rebecca’s relations was Ann Putnam, a chief accuser during the witch hysteria of 1692-1693.
The couple had a number of children: Joshua Safford (b. 6 May 1808); Samuel Page (b. and d. 1810); Rebekah Putnam (b. 1811); Mary Henfield (b. 6 March1814); Samuel Page (b. 9 August 1818), and Eliza Ann (b. 1819), of whom the Pickering Genealogy notes, “[Goodale’s] portrait, which was painted while he was in New Orleans, is now in the possession of his daughter, Miss Eliza A. Goodale, of Highland Avenue, Newtonville, Mass.”
Of his wife, the Pickering Genealogy states, “Mrs. Goodale’s father was a Revolutionary patriot. He enlisted at the breaking of the Revolution, and took part in the battles of Lexington and of Monmouth and was with Washington at the crossing of the Delaware and at Valley Forge. He also served in the campaign of 1779 and was present with company at the storming of Stony Point. After the war, he became a successful merchant, filled many public offices, and was distinguished for his integrity and moral worth. Ω
When it was Koogle’s chance to defend himself, he told the judge and state’s attorney that he had not committed the shooting nor any of the burglaries.
Amazingly—almost miraculously—on 8 August, just four days after the shooting, George Waters Bittle was able to give testimony to Justice of the Peace Christian H. Eckstein whilst propped up in a chair in the bedroom of his Main Street home. Also present during the testimony was State’s Attorney for Frederick County Arthur D. Willard (1872-1959), the counsels for the defense, the accused, Captain Jacob Koogle, Dr. Ralph Browning, Rev. Otto E. Bregenzer (abt. 1877-1920) of St. Paul’s Lutheran Church, and Mrs. Bittle, the former Mary Elizabeth Routzahn (1865-1936.)
Bittle told Willard and Eckstein that on the night of the attempted burglary, “He had seen the burglar around his place early in the evening [and] though he recognized his walk,” the Frederick News noted. “The party wore a dark slouch hat, dark coat, and trousers. He did not see the face of the man at the door sufficiently well to say it was George Koogle, but he could say from what he had seen of Koogle earlier in the evening and what he could say of the man at the door he thought it was George Koogle, although he was sorry to say so.” The dolorous look Bittle may have given Captain Koogle as he spoke can well be imagined.
Justice of the Peace Christian H. Eckstein heard Bittle’s testimony.
Bittle, like his fellow citizens, probably saw Koogle as somewhat of a superhero. For example, the merchant would surely have heard this wartime anecdote from Myersville veteran Daniel Mowen, Koogle’s brother-in-law, who included it in a series of articles he wrote for the newspaper, The Globe: “At the assault of Petersburg, on the 17th of June, 1864, and while the Seventh [Maryland Regiment] was in line, Jacob Koogle, first sergeant of company, saw a shell bounding toward them. He called to the men to ‘look out!’ Watching its course, he attempted to step out of its way when it lodged against his breast. Its force being about spent, he threw it off with his arm without injury to himself and, as it didn’t explode, it injured no one else.” This was before the affair of stealing of the Confederate colors and returning with the secessionist banner and a uniform full of bullet holes. Those twin events could make anyone wonder whether Koogle was divinely blessed.
“About this time, we were visited by heavy thunderstorms. Having shelter, we were obliged to hunt high places upon the ground to spread our blanket, and with knapsack for a pillow, lay down wet and shivering with our gum blanket over us for the rain to beat upon.”
Courtesy Library of Congress.
Daniel Hosea Mowen, who lived for many years in Wolfsville, Myersville, and Hagerstown, was born 28 November, 1839, probably in Middleburg, Snyder County, Pennsylvania. He was eldest child of what grew into a large family headed by his father Peter Mowen (1818-1857) and his mother Susan Rebecca Renner Mowen (1815-1861).
Mowen was raised in Greencastle, Franklin County, not far over the Pennsylvania line from Hagerstown, Maryland. Peter Mowen died, aged 39, when Daniel was 17. His mother died in 1861 when he was 22. By August 1862, when he entered the Union army, Mowen had relocated to Frederick County.
According to an interview in the Frederick News of 21 July, 1976, on the occasion of his 100th birthday, Mowen’s son Waldo claimed that “For awhile, my father must have debated which side of the war to fight on,” although from the invaluable memoire Daniel Mowen left us, which is the focus of this chapter, one would ever take him for anything other than a strict Union man.
Mowen enlisted in C. F. Anderson’s Company I of the Union 7th Maryland Regiment for a three-year term. During the course of his service, he was wounded at the Battle of Spotsylvania Court House, heard the last speech of Abraham Lincoln at the White House, did guard duty at the Old Capital Prison on the night of the president’s assassination, and was present during the trial of the conspirators.
The night was hot and sultry, but with a luminous Moon. George Bittle closed up shop but did not go to bed. As he had done on recent occasions, Bittle sat on his front porch, armed with a breech-loading gun, to watch over his store.
George Waters Bittle General Store, Myersville, Maryland, circa 1905.
On 12 July, 1946, the Hagerstown (Maryland) Daily Mail printed the obituary of local notable George Waters Bittle, who died on 10 July in Frederick City Hospital, aged 79. Bittle was a long-standing board member of the Myersville Savings Bank and had operated a general merchandise store on Main Street for more than half a century. In hindsight, the newly deceased Bittle had likely enjoyed an extra 42 years of life. Against the odds, Bittle survived three bullets fired into him during an attempted burglary of his business in August 1904.
Bittle’s near murder was the byproduct of a series of break-ins in Myersville. Frankly, the town had a crime problem. The young man most likely responsible for these thieveries was the child of another notable citizen—a Civil War hero who’d won the Congressional Medal of Honor for exceptional battlefield bravery—Captain Joseph Koogle.
Handpainted carte de visite of “Little Willie, Uncle George and Aunt Emma’s son,” likely taken between 1860-1863. Many Mid-Maryland children of this generation witnessed the war and carried these memories well into the 20th Century. Ann Longmore-Etheridge Collection.
When James Hard died on 12 March, 1953, in Rochester, New York, the final firsthand battle memories from U.S. Civil War were forever lost. Hard was the last verified soldier on either side of the conflict who actively fought—in his case, as a teenaged infantryman in the 37th New York Volunteer Infantry Regiment—at First Bull Run, Antietam, Chancellorsville, and Fredericksburg.
There were others still alive, however, such as John Caleb Leatherman, who were children and teens during the war years. In Maryland’s Frederick and Washington Counties, and just across the Potomac in West Virginia’s Shepherdstown, these elders possessed indelible memories of South Mountain, Antietam, or Monocacy lain down through civilian, juvenile lenses.
Twelve-year-old Edward Black (1853–1872) had his hand and arm shattered by an exploding shell whilst serving as a Union drummer boy. Courtesy Library of Congress.
One example was Jacob E. Eavey. On 15 August, 1948, he died in the Guildford Nursing Home in Boonsboro at age 97 after a professional life spent running a grocery shop at 29 North Main Street, Keedysville. Eavey was the son of Samuel Eavey (1828-1911) and Catherine Ecker (1828-1868) and was born in Porterstown on 21 October, 1850. He would marry Clementine Eugenia Keedy (1850-1929) and father five daughters and one son.
Like John Leatherman, Eavey kept vivid memories of 16 September, 1862. Whilst John spent the 16th in Middletown, helping his mother nurse wounded soldiers from the previous day’s fighting, 12-year-old Jacob spent it “sitting on a fence beside the road, watching the soldiers striding down South Mountain” on their way to meet their individual destinies at the Battle of Antietam, reported the Hagerstown Daily Herald of 16 August, 1948. When fighting kicked off at Sharpsburg on the 17th, Eavey stood near his parent’s smokehouse in Porterstown, just to the east of Sharpsburg, as a Rebel shell tore through and wrecked the building but spared his life.
“Young John sat fascinated all day, watching the trajectories of shells above the trees of the mountain, followed by the little puffs of smoke that marked their targets.”
John C. Leatherman (1852-1952) and his first wife Susan Rebecca Grossnickle Leatherman (1852-1909).
Just short of his 97th birthday, in May 1950, John Caleb Leatherman spoke to reporter Betty Sullivan from the Hagerstown Daily Mail about his life and boyhood memories of the Union blue and Confederate grey armies’ descent on Frederick County, Maryland. The interview he gave is a boon for historians, as firsthand accounts from the Jackson and Catoctin districts—including Myersville, Wolfsville, Ellerton, Harmony, Jerusalem, Pleasant Walk, Highland, and Church Hill—are almost nonexistent. I recounted two of these pertaining to George Blessing, “Hero of Highland,” in a previous article, and Leatherman’s secondhand testimony was also integral to that reportage, as the Leathermans and Blessings knew each other well.
John Leatherman was born 15 December, 1852, in Harmony (also known for a time as Beallsville)—a nascent town that never fully took root. Today, it is a series of farms and old buildings set along Harmony Road. John was the son of farmer George Leatherman (1827-1907) and his wife, Rebecca Elizabeth Johnson (1827-1908), who married 16 December, 1847. The 1860 Census records that George Leatherman’s farm was worth more than $8,500 and his personal estate more than $4,000—some $360,000 in today’s dollars. At that time, the family had six children, the oldest of whom, Mary (b. 1848) was enumerated as deaf and mute.
John’s father, Elder George Leatherman.
Although he was listed in several Union draft registers of the Jackson District, it’s likely that Leatherman, who was in his 30s during the war, would have opposed serving. He was a devoted member of the Brethren, a pacifist German Baptist sect also known as the Dunkards, was elected to the clergy of the Grossnickle Meeting House in 1865, and would become a church elder in 1880. In an earlier article about Robert Ridgley, the longhaired still-breaker of Myersville, I wrote that Ridgley wanted to be buried near Leatherman, of whom he said, “I feel that I owe practically all from a spiritual standpoint to this Grand Good Man.”
Mary Avery White Forbes, colorized daguerreotype from the Jesse Cress Collection.
This glorious colorization by Sanna Dullaway returns vividly to life Mary White Avery Forbes, a 19th Century denizen of Westborough, Worcester County, Massachusetts. Her birth was recorded on 12 March, 1813, in Roxbury, to William White (1779-1848) and his wife Nancy Avery (1783–1865). In Mary’s time, Roxbury was already an ancient settlement first colonized by the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1630; it is now one of the 23 official neighborhoods of Boston.
The original 1/6th-plate daguerreotype of Mary Forbes, Circa 1848, from the Jesse Cress Collection.
Mary’s future husband, Daniel Hall Forbes, born 5 September, 1808, in Westborough, was the son of Jonathan Forbes (1775-1861) and Esther Chamberlain (1770-1867). According to the 1892 Forbes and Forebush Genealogy: The Descendants of Daniel Forbush, Jonathan Forbes “always resided in the Forbes homestead, West Main Street…. He taught school when a young man. He was a captain as early as 1813, when he was elected deacon of the Evangelical Church, holding the latter office 48 years. He held most of the town offices and was a natural leader in church and town affairs. It is said he was always chairman of every committee in which he served.” The genealogy also notes, “His children, Susannah, Julia, Jonathan, Jr., and Daniel were all baptized Oct. 29, 1808.”
The group baptism was a sign of commitment to Christianity that the Forbes family kept alive for multiple generations. When he died more than four decades later, Daniel, the month-old infant christened that day, would leave hundreds of dollars to missionary societies. His daughter would die in a far away country, serving God’s cause.
In 1864, George Blessing, “Hero of Highland,” bravely battled Confederate raiders on his farm near Wolfsville, Frederick County, Maryland, but the real man and his deeds became almost unrecognizable in popular retellings.
Still image courtesy of the History Channel.
John Caleb Leatherman (1852-1952), who was a child during the Civil War and a neighbor of the man who would earn the sobriquet “Hero of Highland,” told a Hagerstown Daily Mail reporter in 1950, ”Boy, that ol’ George Blessing was a spunky one. Those Rebels were trying to get a hold of all the horses they could. When [my] Father heard about it, he took his horses up into Pennsylvania. Not George Blessing—he just stood pat on his own farm there.”
A barnyard shootout at Blessing’s Highland Farm took place on 9 July, 1864, the same day that the Battle of Monocacy was fought only a few miles away on the outskirts of Frederick City. At the end of that month, the Frederick Examiner ran a letter to the editor, suggesting “the raising of a sum, by the contributions of Union men … for the purpose of procuring a medal, with the appropriate device and inscription, to commemorate [Blessing’s] noble feats of that occasion.”
Frederick Examiner, 27 July, 1864.
In the years that followed, the grandiosity of the tale and the pious nature of the hero was escalated by his niece, the writer Nellie Blessing Eyster, who published grandiose versions in both a noted ladies magazine and in her 1867 novel Chincapin Charlie. In the latter, she called him “one of Nature’s noblemen,” wrote that he was possessed of a “strange power” from “living so close to Jesus,” and that as he was “thoroughly imbued with the spirit of ’76, loving the government for which his fathers died, next to the God whom he so devoutly worshipped … he defended his home from what he sacredly believed an unrighteous invasion.”
Mr. Grumpy’s seething was replaced with grudging tolerance. He was still watching me, but if I played it cool, he would, too.
St. Paul’s Lutheran Cemetery, Myersville, Maryland.
This Halloween, I will be the guest speaker of the Myersville-Wolfsville Area Historical Society, presenting on local ghosts and paranormal phenomenon. Whilst this part of Maryland is rich in folkloric creatures such as a flying monster called the Snallygaster, or the Veiled Lady—a sort of banshee who plagued the environs of South Mountain—neither these nor other similar tales are particularly believable or verifiable.
I will stretch as far afield as Antietam and Gettysburg for parts of my lecture, but one paranormal story, at least, will be from Myersville, and it is my own. I share it now knowing it could be as figmental as the ghostly forms that once circled above Frederick’s Rose Hill Manor, or the Christmas Eve Phantom Flutist of Emmitsburg, who purportedly plays, as he did in life, over his dead father’s grave.
The setting for this tale is the cemetery of St. Paul’s Lutheran Church, directly across Main Street from my home.
"Your Dying Charlotte" 