The 24th Corps "Flying Hospital"

The 24th Corps "Flying Hospital". . By April 1865, surgeons sometimes operated right on the battlefield. Though not a large engagement by Civil War standards, the Battle of Appomattox Court House on April 9th, 1865, saw some of its fiercest fighting here in the vicinity of the Coleman House., The house became the field hospital for surgeons of the "flying" (mobile) hospital of the 24th Army Corps. One of the casualties tended to in the house was Lieutenant Colonel Jonathan Hill of the 11th Maine Infantry. The one-armed colonel had been struck by a shell fragment in his knee., Another was the enslaved woman, Hannah Reynolds, who received aid from the Federal surgeons, but did not survive her wound. The soldiers that succumbed to their wounds were buried in the Coleman yard until they were moved to Poplar Grove Cemetery in Petersburg in 1866 and 1867., Those that did survive were sent two miles southwest to Appomattox Station where the 24th Corps' medical director, Surgeon J.B. Morrison, established a more substantial hospital., According to Chaplain Wright of the 8th Maine Infantry, Assistant Surgeon Benjamin Williams tended to the wounded Reynolds, the only civilian casualty of the Battle of Appomattox Court House, "with as much care, skill, and tenderness, as I had seen him display in dressing the wound of a major general commanding a corps."