Orphaned Daughter Last Family Member Left During Civil War: 52 Ancestors 2024 Prompt “End of the Line”

 

Young Mills Daughter Loses Both Parents and Brother in Single Year

Gehial Hiram Mills: 1833-1863 (Maternal Second Great-Granduncle)
Helen Egleston: 1839-1863 (Maternal Second Great-Grandaunt by Marriage)
Gehial Mills Jr.: 1863-1863 (Maternal First Cousin 3x Removed)
Hannah Amy Mills: 1856-1945 (Maternal First Cousin 3x Removed)

 

Orrin Oliver Mills (see previous post) was not the only Mills son to serve in the Civil War. His older brother, Gehial Hiram Mills, usually known as Hiram Mills, also served in the Union Army. However, unlike Orrin, Hiram did not survive the war. He was sent home wounded but never recovered, dying in Wisconsin in September 1863. However, Hiram was not the only member of his family to die that year. His wife and infant son also died in 1863, leaving his young daughter, Hannah Amy Mills, an orphan. She was the end of her father’s line.

Gehial Hiram Mills was born October 29, 1833 in St. Lawrence County, New York, to parents Joel Mills and Orpha Pratt Mills. He was the third of their five children. The family moved to Wisconsin in the 1840s, and that’s where Hiram met his wife, Helen (often recorded as Hellen) Egleston. The couple married November 4, 1855; Hiram was 22 and Helen was only sixteen. Their first child, a daughter named Hannah Amy, was born a year later on December 26, 1856.

By 1860, Hiram was farming near Marcellon, Columbia County, Wisconsin. The census record indicates he was renting a farm, as the census form shows no value in the real property column. 

Perhaps that was why, a year later, he enlisted in the Portage Light Guard, a cavalry unit that was formed in the area near Hiram’s farm (Marcellon was ten miles from the town of Portage). Soldiers often received or were promised bounty money for signing up, ranging from $20 to $60, which was a considerable amount in that era. Hiram may have dreamed of using his military pay to buy farmland of his own.

Hiram’s name appears in the unit roster in the Wisconsin State Register on April 27, 1861. The article also notes that the Light Guard was “accepted by the Governor for the second regiment of the Wisconsin Militia.” A full roster of Wisconsin volunteers lists Hiram as a “wagoner”, which was a soldier who drove a wagon that carried supplies or regimental baggage. The wagoner was responsible for the draft animals—usually a team of four horses or six mules—and the wagon itself.

Hiram Mills at time of Civil War

With Hiram gone to war, and the farm likely rented to someone new, what happened to Hiram’s wife and daughter? I believe they moved in with Helen’s parents, Benjamin and Hannah Egleston, who lived nearby in Columbia County near Pardeeville.

2nd Wisconsin Cavalry regimental flag

The Second Wisconsin Cavalry finished training and organizing in Milwaukee in March 1862 and were sent to St. Louis March 24. Hiram probably had at least one furlough home before being shipped out, because Helen Mills became pregnant, delivering a son either late in 1862 or in early January 1863. Tragically, she died shortly after the birth on January 7, 1863, leaving her two young children in her parents’ care.   

Helen Egleston Mills

Hiram’s regiment served in Missouri and Arkansas until January 1863 when they were moved to Memphis, Tennessee. By June, they had pushed south to Vicksburg, and then were assigned to General Sherman’s Jackson campaign in July.

Hiram Mills headstone at Pardeeville Cemetery

At some point during 1863, Hiram was injured and became seriously ill, for he was furloughed in August 1863 and sent home to Wisconsin. By the time he arrived in Wisconsin, his young wife was already dead. Her parents must have cared for her little son, Gehial Jr., very well, for he had survived nearly eight months, long enough for his father to meet him. Little Gehial Jr. died September 4, 1863, and his father, Gehial Hiram Mills, died in Pardeeville just six days later on September 10, 1863. Helen was 24 and Hiram was only 29 at death. Their remaining child, Hannah Amy Mills, was only six years old when she was orphaned. Hiram, Helen and Gehial Jr. were all buried in the Pardeeville Cemetery, but only Hiram’s gravestone has been photographed.

Pardeeville, Wisconsin during the 1800s

Some family trees claimed Hiram died from war wounds. However, I discovered that Hiram wasn’t listed among the Second Wisconsin Cavalry’s war casualties, so his unit commanders didn’t treat his injury as a battle wound. The only regiment records I found merely stated that Hiram died in Pardeeville, Wisconsin.

I would have been left in the dark about Hiram’s true cause of death if I hadn’t discovered his pension file—35 fascinating pages that recount how his daughter’s guardian, her grandmother Hannah Egleston, fought to receive a dependent’s pension for Hannah Amy. Her initial application stated that Hiram died of illness contracted in war, which led the pension department to initially deny the application—a disease could have been unrelated to Hiram’s service, after all. However, Hannah Egleston persisted, explaining that Hiram’s illness was caused by an injury he received while on duty. She contacted officers and soldiers from his regiment, begging for affidavits that would support the pension application.  

Part of Hannah Egleston's pension application on behalf of her granddaughter

The army demanded that she provide an affidavit from a commissioned officer in Hiram’s unit. This turned out to be impossible. Hannah submitted a new affidavit stating that she was not able to provide proof of Hiram’s injury from his cavalry unit’s officers because “at the time of the said injury said Mills was on a scout under the command of Sergeant Hewitt and no commissioned officers was present and knowing to this said hurt…”

However, she did obtain the affidavit of two other regiment members, George Hewitt (presumably the sergeant leading the scouting party) and George W. Ames, who stated that they were also in the Second Wisconsin Cavalry, knew Hiram and  “in the line of his duty as a soldier near Helena Arkansas the said Mills was thrown by his horse rearing and falling over backwards and on to him and his left-side badly injured so that from that time till the next August when he was…furloughed he did but little duty, was a great deal of the time in hospital and continually complaining of the injury to his side.”

Obviously from his comrades’ description, Hiram was no longer a wagoner by 1863, but was a regular cavalry soldier, riding on scouting parties and participating in battles. The injury sounds horrific—I can imagine the horror as the huge horse fell on top of Hiram.

The doctor who attended Hiram in Wisconsin, Orin D. Coleman, testified that he was called to the Egleston house to help Hiram on August 25, 1863 and “found him very sick with inflammation of the bowels (peritonitis)” and that he continued to attend to Hiram until his death. He reported that he read the affidavit supplied by Hiram’s cavalry comrades about the injury Hiram sustained and “that such an injury…might have been and probably was the precipitary (I think that is the word—hard to read) cause of the inflammation of which he died.”

Poor Hiram. He must have suffered some sort of internal crush injury that left him with an intestinal rupture and infection. The pain must have been agonizing. How did he manage to get back home from Arkansas in such a state? And how did he manage to survive for nearly three weeks after he made it home?

The additional affidavits were apparently persuasive, for on September 11, 1866 the army approved the pension application. Hannah Amy received a pension in the amount of $8 per month back-dated to the date of her father’s death, and continuing until December 28, 1873. I’m sure this money must have been a godsend to Hannah Amy’s grandparents.

Pension approval record

As Hiram’s daughter grew up, she went by her middle name of Amy. She was still living with her grandparents at the time of the 1870 census, along with their two youngest children. Her grandmother and guardian died a few years later. There are no further records of Amy until she appears on the 1880 census in Meeker County, Minnesota, married to Harry Porter. The census form records that they had married in 1880. By the end of that year, they were parents.

Amy Mills Porter, husband Harry, and three of their children.

Amy and Harry went on to have six children. Following Harry’s death in 1895, Amy supported her children first as a seamstress, and then by the 1910 census, Amy was operating a restaurant in Sanborn, North Dakota, and her three youngest daughters were teaching and working as telephone operators. She ended up moving to Washington state, and died September 1, 1945. She was eighty-eight years old.

Amy Mills may have been the end of Gehial Hiram Mills’ line, but her children and grandchildren carried on the Mills family legacy into the future.  

 

Sources:

Wisconsin Volunteers: War of the Rebellion 1861-1865. Arranged Alphabetically. Compiled under the direction of the Adjutants General, published by the State of Wisconsin, Democrat Printing Company. 1914. https://content.wisconsinhistory.org/digital/collection/tp/id/36915/rec/3

US, Civil War "Widows' Pensions", 1861-1910. National Archives. Case Files of Approved Pension Applications of Widows and Other Veterans of the Army and Navy Who Served Mainly in the Civil War and the War With Spain, compiled 1861 – 1934. Record group 15. https://www.fold3.com/file/280249850/mills-hiram-us-civil-war-widows-pensions-1861-1910?terms=mills,war,us,civil,hiram

FindaGrave entries for Gehial Hiram Mills, Helen Egleston Mills, and Gehial  Mills, Jr. https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/45710095/gehial-hiram-mills?_gl=1*192jxs4*_gcl_au*MTg1NTA3NTEwOC4xNzE1MDM0MzIy*_ga*OTczMjY1MzMyLjE3MDQ4NTI3MzQ.*_ga_4QT8FMEX30*ZDc1MjVjMWMtYmU3MC00ZjUyLTg1NDUtNmFmZGRiY2NkYzkzLjI0NS4xLjE3MjAxMjIzMDguNDkuMC4w*_ga_LMK6K2LSJH*ZDc1MjVjMWMtYmU3MC00ZjUyLTg1NDUtNmFmZGRiY2NkYzkzLjI0Ni4xLjE3MjAxMjIzMDguMC4wLjA.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2nd_Wisconsin_Cavalry_Regiment

Wisconsin Veterans Museum: 2^nd Wisconsin Cavalry. Photo of Standard, 2nd Wisconsin Cavalry V1964 219 7.  https://wisvetsmuseum.com/2nd-wisconsin-cavalry/