Kewaunee County & the Spanish-American War

Veterans' Memorial at Kewaunee County Courthouse, ca. 1908

General Robert E. Lee surrendered to General Ulysses S. Grant on April 9, 1865 and the Civil War was over. However the country was living in its aftermath 32 years later when President William McKinley* asked for 125,000 volunteers to fight a new war. It was April 1898 when without debate both houses of Congress passed a resolution providing for a regular and volunteer army. Wisconsin was asked to supply three regiments.

Some felt the President’s call was much like Abraham Lincoln’s on April 15, 1861 when he asked for 75,000 men. Purposes were different. This time it was for a war with Spain following the February 1898 sinking of the battleship Maine in Havana harbor. In January, before the call for volunteers, Kewaunee County's Frank Slama and Ed Holek went to Milwaukee to enlist with the regular army. G.I. McDonald was the first Algoma resident to “go south” to enlist. Intending to enlist in the Navy, he apparently had a change of heart as he enlisted with Co. I, 1^st Wisconsin Volunteer Infantry. Emotions were running high when one prominent business man said he hoped the U.S. would get the “damndest licking it ever got” in the war with Spain. The editor said the man, who also served on the city council, should be “hung from his own lamp post p.d.q.”

The paper noted the flag pole Manager Perry raised at the Veneer and Seating plant. Perry said the flag would not come down until every Spanish soldier was driven from the hemisphere. Residents were displaying flags and children were carrying them. John Raether was in front of the Hotel Algoma on the southeast corner of 4th and Steele, when his horse was spooked by a child waving a flag. A runaway was averted, fortunately, and the only damage done was to his wagon pole.

Orrin Warner, Jr. was born into one of the first three founding families in the place that would become Algoma. Warner was living in Kewaunee at the time and came to Algoma, it was thought, to say good-by because he was answering the call to duty. Warner’s patriotism made the paper, but actually he was in town before he went to Pennsylvania to take a job selling stoves for a company that had operated in the county years earlier. The Alaska correspondent for the Record opined that men in that vicinity weren’t anxious “to manifest their patriotism” as they weren’t enlisting. One identified as Fritz said he’d go if he could get on a torpedo submarine, but the correspondent seemed to think Fritz was crazy, although a man could stay out of the enemy’s sight on such a “new-fangled diving machine.” According to the Green Bay Gazette, brothers Hugh and Robert Minahan had volunteered. The men had interests in both Green Bay and Kewaunee County. By the advent of World War l, the Minahan county interests spanned Algoma, Kewaunee and Casco and included a mercantile, a drug store, and with their brother William who would go down on the Titanic, a maple syrup camp.  Robert was a physician serving the medical needs of county residents and expected to be an army doctor. Hugh planned on the cavalry.

While the country needed men, the Record said the Secretary of War and the Surgeon General of the Army said they did not want women. Their decision was “unalterable” and women would not be employed or trained as nurses to care for the sick and wounded in the war, or be recognized in any other capacity. The paper said such an ultimatum was sure to cause a sensation within the country, and it did. Following the Civil War, there was a pool of nurses and the need for them was urgent.Things changed and by the war’s end, over 1,500 female nurses had served. The public outcry that men on the battlefields needed good care could not be ignored. In tribute, there is a Spanish-American War Nurses Memorial at Arlington National Cemetery.

During summer 1898 the men of General Shafer’s 5^th Corp were so sick it was felt the army would die if it remained in Cuba. It was felt that withdrawing to New York for a few weeks would restore health. Dysentery and malaria were rampant, however yellow fever was coming under control Since little attention was paid to Cuban sanitation, the Spanish were blamed for the diseases too.

The country needed chaplains. At an Evangelical Lutheran Synod meeting, it was decided the synod needed a representative with the army in Cuba. The synod’s choice was St. Paul’s Rev. F.J. Eppling who was appointed by Governor Scofield as Chaplain-At-Large. The Algoma congregation gave him a leave of absence on July 10, 1898 and appointed a pastor pro tempore. Eppling returned to Algoma much run down but glad he had served. Ten years later, Rev. Eppling resigned because of failing health and a general nervous breakdown. Following treatment he went to work in the missions in Oregon where he died in 1918. While Eppling didn't die in the war, his death was precipitated by it.

Paying for the war was going to require sacrificing just as the Civil War did. The Manitowoc Pilot said the sentiment of the hour seemed to be “Do things and make others pay for them.” It felt that if the war was so desirable, its burdens should be spread out. At question then was taxing breweries to pay for the war with Spain. After all, it wasn’t the brewers who started the war. That paper felt that some patriots would certainly not feel the consequences of such patriotism. Perhaps those who wanted to rid the country of demon rum thought they had an opportunity to do it.

In April Algoma’s grocers noted that prices were going up. Large numbers of residents were stockpiling stores of food and beverages in anticipation of prices that would surely rise. The grocers said there were those ordering 100# or a barrel of sugar and 50 to 75# lots of coffee. One family bought 50# of tea. In one week sugar jumped 30 cents a 100 pounds, while flour was already 25 cents a barrel more and coffee had risen by 2 cents a pound.

Wenzel Strnad of Casco enlisted in Co. E, 16th Volunteer Infantry in the spring of 1898. By December he was back in Casco on a 30-day furlough, recuperating from malaria. His friends joined together to buy him a gold watch and presented it while he was home. They thought they’d never see him again, fearing for his life following the Battle of Santiago when his mother stopped hearing from him. Of the 84 men in Strnad’s company, only 35 came out alive.  In July George McDonald wrote from Camp Cuba in Jacksonville, Florida. He told how the men drilled 5 days a week, had inspections on Saturday and rested on Sunday. There were no saloons near the camp but there were canteens which sold the products normally found in one. Rio Creek’s James Stennard was in Cuba with the regular army in July. Former resident Fred Bosenberg was another enlistee. Fred was a child when his father owned the cigar store in the north side of the Bastar Hotel on the northeast corner of 4^th and Clark, but residents remembered the family. Strnad was furloughed when Ben Fagg, who served in the Civil War, answered the second call for volunteers and  enlisted in Co. B, 3^rd W.S. Infantry. Fagg had expectations of being sent to the Philippines where things were already heating up.

The Spanish-American War was short, lasting the summer of 1898. The Philippine-American War is a separate conflict fought between 1899 and about 1902.

About a year after the Philippine-American War was over, it seemed as if newspapers were looking forward to more wars when readership was informed in March 1903 that future battlefield gunshot wounds would be less awful. Dr. Nicholas Sen was one of five American delegates to a medical conference in Madrid where he was quoted saying, “War in the near future will lose a share of the horror.”There was a new method of treating wounds with an antiseptic that would be “a boon to humanity” since it helped prevent infection. Such a dressing had been used during the Philippine-American War and had achieved “wonderful results in preventing mortality” on the battlefield.

A few years later, May 1905, it was announced though Memorial Day had been mostly reserved to honor those who died in the Civil War, those who died in the Spanish-American War and the War with Mexico would also be remembered. The article pointed out that in the years following the Civil War, Memorial Day broadened to become a national event.

* William McKinley had a tie to Kewaunee Co. Ferdinand Haevers was a Belgium immigrant to Kewaunee Co. and in New Orleans when the Civil War began. Caught up in all the war hoopla, he enlisted in the Confederate army. While foraging he saw an officer ride into a clearing. Feeling it would be murder to shoot, he remembered his training, that an officer without a horse was as good as dead. So he shot the horse. The shots brought McKinley’s men. Haevers went to a POW camp for the 2^nd time in his military career. Had Haevers followed his first instinct and shot, the course of history would have been changed.

Veneer and Seating Plant became U.S. Plywood and is now Algoma Hardwoods.

Sources: Algoma Record newspapers; An-An-api-sebe: Where is the River?. c. 2001; History of Commercial Development in Youngs and Steele Plat and Other Selected Properties, Algoma, Wisconsin, c. 2006; Yours Truly, from Kewaunee County, c. 2012; Questions answered by R. Horton, Reference & Outreach Archivist, Wisconsin Veterans' Museum, April 2015. Postmarked in 1908, the postcard is part of the blogger's collection.