A Baldwinsville woman found an authentic piece of American history.
Kristi Owlett discovered 18 original letters her great-great-grandfather, a Union Army soldier, wrote to her great-great-grandmother while he was fighting in the Civil War. The letters were from Tioga County, Pennsylvania.
Once she discovered the letters, Owlett scanned them and typed them out in today’s vernacular, keeping the originals and the copies side by side in a binder. She said the letters reveal the emotional toll the war took on both soldiers and families.
“If I am so lucky to get home once more, I think I will stay with you until death part us forever," one letter reads. "Take good care of the little ones and keep them for me.”
Owlett found the letters when she came across an old box of her family belongings. A crumbling newspaper from the 1860’s was the first clue as to what was inside.
“I picked the pieces of the paper off the top, and I happen to see the top of it and it said '1865.' And I said, ‘Oh, this is important.’ So I dug down through the papers and all of a sudden, I saw all of these handwritten notes,” she said.
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They were letters from her great-great-grandfather Albert Smith to her great-great-grandmother Martha, written while Smith was fighting in the Civil War with a group of Union soldiers from Tioga County.
“This is priceless because you begin to understand how they lived, how they thought and what their feelings were towards the Civil War,” she said.
She said the letters also offered a glimpse at Smith encountering skyrocketing wartime prices. The letters revealed that tobacco was $2 a pound.
She says the letters, which are in near-perfect condition, also paint a stark picture of the toll the war took on Union Army soldiers. Initially enjoying the experience, she said things changed as the war dragged on.
“The railroad had been torn up, there was no tobacco, there was nothing to eat. Everyone is hungry, they weren’t getting paid, and then, of course, you have the terrible slaughter during the war of human beings, and he saw that first-hand,” she said of her Smith's emotional state in the latter years of the war.
Often seen only through paintings or black-and-white photographs, the passages offer an intimate look at the real emotional price of a war that took more American lives than any other.
“I like a soldier’s life very well,” read another letter. “But I’ve been a soldier long enough. I don’t want to be a soldier no longer, but I can’t help myself. They’ve got me fast, and I will have to stay as long as they want me.”
To complete the collection, she also has the desk where her great-great-grandmother wrote to her husband back in the 1860’s, letters she believes were destroyed shortly after they were received.
She recently had the desk refinished by Tobin’s Refinishing in Syracuse.
“When my mother passed away a couple years ago, I said to my niece, ‘does anyone want the desk?’ And she said ‘nobody wants the desk.’ And she said, 'if you want it, take it.' I said ‘I know the whole history of that desk.'"
It's a desk where letters went out to a soldier who, despite being part of a mission to keep the United States of America together, always had his mind not far from home.
“‘My mind is always on those I love so much and if left,” began one letter.
“You can really see in their introduction that was the first thing they thought of, was their family as they greeted them in their writing, first thing,” Owlett said reading it aloud.
Owlett said she also has an entire container of letters between her grandparents during World War II, when her grandfather was fighting in Europe.
Organizing them, she said, is her next challenge.
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September 03, 2022 at 06:13AM
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Baldwinsville woman discovers 18 original Civil War letters - Spectrum News
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