A soldier’s recollections

As Ohio pio­neers my ances­tors, George and Jane Pisor Wolfe, fresh out of Indi­ana County Penn­syl­va­nia and eager to home­stead on their 100 acres in Athens County, had much to do. They cleared land, built a log cabin, planted and har­vested a corn crop, had chil­dren, built a church and a school­house and estab­lished a com­mu­nity. They also had to fight for their coun­try and they did so willingly.

George and Jane Wolfe had five chil­dren. Their third child George Pisor then had 10 sons and two daugh­ters. Of the 10 sons six of them fought in the Civil War and two died. Ken Burns would have delighted in Fran­cis Wolfe’s let­ters to his fam­ily. He writes of his first real fight on May, 1862, “…. at McDow­ell with Stonewall Jack­son but he had the advan­tage in pos­ses­sion and out­num­bered us and we had to retreat a few miles when we got rein­force­ments and at Cedar Moun­tain we met him again where we had hot work for awhile but we made it so unhealthy for them they were glad to haul off for repairs. At Chan­cel­lorsville May 2 and 3 we had it a plenty, we were in the first line of bat­tle which was nearly a mile long and guns as close together as was safe to use them. We went into action just after din­ner and stayed with them until night when we ceased fir­ing but every man was at his post for we were expect­ing an attack any time.

I was sit­ting on the ground lean­ing against a wheel of the gun and doz­ing when there came a vol­ley of mus­ketry from the enemy’s direc­tion. We were on our feet in an instant as we sup­posed it was our pick­ets fir­ing but it was not repeated and we were soon doz­ing again, but soon a scout came in and told us Stonewall Jack­son had been shot by his own men. He was out read­just­ing his lines and had given orders to fire on any­one com­ing from our direc­tion and in the dark­ness they had mis­taken him for our men. This was about 10 o’clock at night. We were only about 500 yards from them. The shoot­ing of Jack­son threw them into con­fu­sion and they began their retreat before morn­ing. It was at this fight that Irvin (Fran­cis’ younger brother) got his ear shot off. There had been sev­eral of the boys killed by sharp­shoot­ers and I finally located them in a bushy-topped tree by the puffs of smoke from their guns. I called the Captain’s atten­tion to it and he took out his field glasses and soon saw I was right. He told Wals­ing­ham, who was the best gun­ner in the bat­tery, about it.

He shaded his eyes a minute and saw the smoke and called for a solid shot. He was a great fel­low to swear and says, ‘I’ll chill their liv­ers, the damn boogers,’ and a lot more none too nice talk. He took care­ful aim at the trunk of the tree and at the dis­charge of the gun we could plainly see the sliv­ers fly­ing and the tree began to top­ple and Rebs tum­bling out, strike the ground and lay there. It looked like there were a dozen or more of them. There were many watch­ing the shot and when they saw the result you should have heard the cheer they gave Wals­ing­ham. This put a stop to sharp­shoot­ing in that direc­tion.” (The Wolfe Fam­ily His­tory by Nora Wolfe Atkin­son, Law­head Press, 1964).

Sylvia Zim­mer­man is the owner of Ful­ton Creek Jer­sey Cheese in Rich­wood. She holds two grad­u­ate degrees and, when not work­ing on her farm or pur­su­ing her inter­est in sus­tain­able agri­cul­ture, writes her own blog.

Posted by Sylvia Zimmerman on Sep 4 2012. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS Feed. Comments can be made below.