downtown Hillsdale.
Kristiana Mork | Collegian
The Hillsdale County Historical Society and Mitchell Research Center received over 130 donations in 2016 detailing the lives of Hillsdale residents dating back as far as the American Civil War.
Donations included yearbooks, genealogies, pictures, newspaper clippings, books, and a plaque. People donate these materials, sometimes dating back to the 1800’s, because they want them to be preserved, Research Center President Evelyn Jacob said.
They want to share their stories with the public.
This year’s donations to the historical society included letters describing life during the Civil War.
“Out of the blue, Ed Pickell, who currently lives in Florida, contacted us through our website,” said JoAnne Miller, a member of the historical society. “He said he was getting on in years and he had some Civil War letters that he had just run across in a cardboard shoe box in his closet, and asked, ‘would we want them?’”
Pickell’s letters primarily described the lives of two of his distant relatives, Jerome and Hiram “Hick” Fountain.
Jerome Fountain wrote about working as a picket guard for the Union Army, where he ate hard crackers, bacon, figs, and roasted corn.
In one letter, Jerome Fountain wrote that he was glad to see his brother Hick standing up on a bank by the side of the road.
“Never saw him look tougher in my life,” Jerome Fountain wrote. “Says he is pretty satisfied with soldiering as am I.”
But the Fountain letters also describe the harshness of war. Jerome Fountain’s last letter came several days before U.S. Army records report that he died of malaria in Washington, D.C. Hick Fountain’s last letter came from what the historical society thinks may have been the battlefield at Chancellorsville.
“I am yet unharmed,” he wrote in March 1863, “we have had three days fighting None of importance going on today this is all I have time to write now. Yours, Hick.”
Hick Fountain was killed at Gettysburg on July 2, 1863.
Shortly after receiving Bickell’s donation, Miller said she received another set of Civil War letters, and while she was transcribing the second set, she received a third.
The third set of letters was sent to Jackson resident Pat Bildner’s great-grandmother, Delphine “Dell” Chester during the end of the Civil War. The letters describe the building of national cemeteries and Chester’s courtship with her husband, Jirah Young.
“I was just a little girl growing up when I first heard Grandma read the letters,” Bildner said. “We’d be at Grandma’s house and she enjoyed talking about history. When she was a little girl the Indians would come up to the house and look in the window and would be sleeping on the front porch when they woke up. She just liked to tell me all about her life and what it was like in 1894.”
For Miller, the letters are a glimpse into what life was like on the battlefield and during the Civil War.
“I can’t tell you how excited and thrilled and just blessed I feel to have been able to have touched these letters and to have transcribed them so other people can enjoy them more than I did with my magnifying glass and trying to get the right words,” Miller said.
