Kewaunee County and the Civil War, 7

 

Books have been written and movies have been made about wars and the men who fought them. Some deal with the horror while others present a kind of a fairy tale romantic version. The five Sullivan brothers of Waterloo, Iowa, who went down together on a ship during World War ll, were the subject of such a movie. Their parents eventually toured the country selling war bonds, asking that their sons had not died in vain. Eighty years earlier, Ahnapee's George Washington Elliot gave four of his sons to the Civil War. Two never returned. What is written about Elliot seems to indicate "tradition," however there is no Jimmy Stewart, Audie Murphy or John Wayne movie telling the Elliot story.

The first Elliot arrived in Swampscott, Massachusetts in 1628, seven years after the founding of Plymouth Rock. Elliot’s grandfathers served in the Revolutionary War. His father served in the War of 1812 and George Elliott himself was a veteran of the Mexican War. His sons followed the Elliot tradition.

Charles D. Elliot was the first Ahnapee man to enlist on June 28, 1861. He joined Captain - later General - Bragg’s Company E, 6^th Wisconsin, which became known as the Iron Brigade. He served at Bull Run and was severely wounded at Antietam though lived to tell about it. Following the war, Charles Elliot became editor of The Star, a newspaper in Reading, Pennsylvania.

Park Benjamin Elliot learned his printing skills at the Enterprize* and was called a superior talent. He was serving as a printer at the Appleton Post Crescent when he joined Company C, 10^th Wisconsin. Just a little more than a year later, at the age of 19, he was in a corn field at Chaplin Hills, Kentucky when he was shot in the head while supporting Simon’s Indiana Battery. A fellow soldier wrote that Park was ”as brave as a lion.”

Brother Irving W. Elliot enlisted on August 16, 1862. Though he made corporal a few weeks later, he entered service as a drummer boy and was the youngest man in Company l, 32^nd Infantry. Irving Elliot was with Sherman on the march through Georgia and was in Washington D.C. in time to wave at President Lincoln who was on his way to Ford’s Theatre.

David Elliot enlisted on August 31, 1862, just two weeks after Irving. In a letter to his father, David reported that of the 950 men who left Fond du Lac with him, only about 340 were fit for duty and that men were dying at a rate of two per day. David died at Nashville, one of many who died of typhoid.

Irving Elliot, who had worked for the Enterprize between 1859 and 1861, wrote his father saying that he would be proud to know he (Irving) had never been in the guard house or under arrest, had never been absent from roll call and had never served extra duty for misconduct. Irving went on to say that few in the regiment could say the same. He continued saying that he “had the satisfaction of knowing that I was not home sucking my paw when the black hearted of the South were trying to tear down the old Starry Banner that we have lived under so many years. I am fighting the devil as long as there are any of them left.”

Irving Elliot was 95 years old when he died in Wauwatosa in December 1941. He had been living with his son Frank for the previous four years. Irving was both Kewaunee and Milwaukee County’s last surviving Civil War Veteran. He was also Wisconsin’s oldest Mason.

The Elliot brothers and the other men of Kewaunee County served in the Civil War with distinction and gave their lives for a cause they believed in. So did the Sullivan brothers and hundreds of thousands other young men, and more recently women, who served in the wars and conflicts in which the U.S. has engaged since the first Elliot arrived in Massachusetts.

*The paper was the Enterprize until 1865 when it was renamed Enterprise.