Echoes Homeward

Echoes Homeward. The Battle of the Wilderness. , Once schoolmates, friends, and neighbors, they came here as soldiers from Yorkville, South Carolina; Pen Yan, New York; Clarksville, Virginia; Barre, Vermont; and a hundred other towns, North and South. Their deaths in these woods on May 5 and 6, 1864 devastated familes and communities hundreds of miles away. , In Birmingham, Pennsylvania, outside Pittsburgh, Almira Patterson (right) learned of the death of her husband in these woods when she received a letter from one of his subordinate officers. The death of Colonel John W. Patterson plunged Almira into a struggle from which she would never fully recover. A widow with three children, she received a pension of just $350 per year. The Orphan's Court of Allegheny County required her to sell her home to support the family. She never remarried and died in 1910. The Pattersons' young daughter Mary died of scarlet fever in 1868, adding to her mother's woe. , A long, mournful blast of a train whistle announced the arrival of war news to Yorkville, South Carolina in May 1864. Caroline Harper Jamison Jenkins, (left) wife to Confederate General Micah Jenkins, gathered with dozens of other townspeople at the train station to hear the latest. What she heard broke her heart. Her husband was dead, killed along the Orange Plank Road on May 6. With four young boys to raise and without income, Caroline moved nearer to family on Edisto Island, then earned a living tutoring young girls. She later opened a boarding house. Although only 26 when her husband died, Caroline never remarried.