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- The rise and fall of Capaha Park's wooden grandstand (4/9/24)
- Death of Judge Pat Dyer, prosecutor of the famous peonage case here in 1906 (4/2/24)2
- A third steamer Cape Girardeau was christened 100 years ago (3/26/24)
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- The humanist philosophy of Lester Mondale (3/12/24)1
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From the Morgue
The Southeast Missourian's resident historian Sharon K. Sanders blogs about interesting pieces of local history pulled from the newspaper's morgue -- the place where our old editions are kept.
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Find your Union vet's name on this list
Posted Thursday, August 21, 2014, at 12:00 AM
People who read my "Out of the Past" column in the Southeast Missourian tell me I should use more names. So for those of you who who like hunting through for your own name or for someone you know, this blog is for you.
Periodically over the years, the Missourian would list the survivors of the Civil War, both Union and Confederate, who were residing in Cape Girardeau County. Obviously, as time marched on, that list grew shorter and shorter, until it apparently ended with the death of C. Alexander Wills in December 1941.
A great many of the Union survivors of that war joined the Grand Army of the Republic. Cape Girardeau County, for example, had seven posts: Henry Justi Post No. 173 at Cape Girardeau, Maj. A.B. Carroll Post No. 310 at Jackson, Capt. James Johnson Post No. 350 at Arnsberg, Appleton Post No. 365, Louis F. Bierwirth Post No. 402 (African-American) at Cape Girardeau, J.L. Wray Post No. 431 at Egypt Mills, and L. Stevenson Post No. 488 at Pocahontas.
(The Missourian published the above photo in 2012. It was submitted to us by Dorothy Meyer-Mullen of Troy, Mo., in the hopes of learning the names of these members of the Appleton Post. She noted that John Winkler was identified as the fourth man from the left in the first row, and that Frank Winkler was the second from the right in the back row. Meyer-Mullen's grandmother, Victoria Unterreiner Wucher, originally owned the photograph. The plea for IDs bore no fruit, however.)
Curiously, I could find only two G.A.R. posts in Scott County: Commerce Post No. 382 and Warren T. Stewart Post No. 457 at Benton. The Commerce post was also apparently an African-American unit. The article that follows indicates that the Bierwirth Post from Cape Girardeau eventually merged with the Commerce post. You may also recognize some of the names in this article as belonging to men who were from Scott County. Why they didn't join the Benton post is unknown. But I did spot a number of my own Scott County relatives in among the Justi Post names: Ferdinand Bisher, John Blattel (spelled Blettel here), Joseph Dumey (spelled Dimme), Church Rasberry, and John H. Sander.
Good luck finding your own relatives among these Civil War vets.
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