Posts Tagged ‘Civil War’
Gettysburg infantryman, James Francis Towner, Remembered and Honored 147 years later
By Sue Hunter Weir In April 1932, members of the Minneapolis Cemetery Protective Association (MCPA) ordered a military marker for James F. Tower, a man they believed to have been a Civil War vet. When the marker arrived they had it set on the grave of a man named John K. Tower where it has been ever since. No one, it seems, noticed that the first name on the marker was James, not John. Private James Francis Towner (not Tower), the man that the MCPA thought that they were honoring, has been buried in an unmarked grave in a different section of the cemetery since 1865. Private James Francis Towner was a veteran of Company K 1st Minnesota Infantry; he was mustered in at Fort Snelling on April 29, 1861. James Towner was one of the 215 (out of 265) men from the 1st Minnesota who were wounded at Gettysburg in July 1863. The inscription on the 1st Minnesota”'s monument at Gettysburg sums up the vital contribution that these men made to the Union cause: “In self sacrificing [...]
Deaths of entire family grieves Cora Stickney Deaths of husband and three children within 15 years grieved Cora Stickney greatly highlighted by 80 day vigil of daughter”'s “trance”
By Sue Hunter Weir It wasn”'t often that the death of someone buried in Layman”'s Cemetery was reported in the New York Times, but the story of Cora Stickney”'s burial was a most unusual, almost gothic, tale. Cora was the daughter of John H. and Ann Stickney; her parents were transplanted New Englanders, who moved to Minnesota shortly after the Civil War. Mr. Stickney was a Civil War veteran who served in the 16th Maine Infantry. After arriving in Minneapolis he went into business but by the early 1870s was in poor health, and on March 20, 1876, two weeks shy of his 34th birthday, he died of “quick consumption”. Less than six months later their youngest son and namesake, John Hanson Stickney, died from scarlet fever at the age of two. Ann Stickney went to work as a teacher to support her two surviving children, Cora and William. The 1880 federal census shows that Cora, then age 12, was no longer in school but working as an apprentice to a hair [...]
