Dakota County's Civil War soldiers come alive through woman's research

Shirley Dalaska's enlistment in the Civil War will last longer than many of the Hastings-area soldiers she's researching.

Dalaska, of Hastings, has volunteered to invest five years prowling Dakota County cemeteries, researching period newspapers, corresponding with descendants and shaking dust off city records. Two years into the project, she's already found evidence of 992 residents who left Hastings to join the Union armies or moved to Hastings after the war.

"I hate to see these men disappear with only their name or the birth and death date on their tombstone," said Dalaska, 59, whose research also extends to the Dakota County cities of Mendota, New Trier, Vermillion and Miesville.

Dalaska's voluminous research -- already amounting to several hundred pages -- will become a city-funded book in 2011. That's the 150th anniversary of the start of the four-year war and a good time to remind today's residents in Hastings and Dakota County of their predecessors' sacrifices, said city historian Cindy Thury Smith.

"It's bigger than I thought it would be," said Dalaska, who started researching Civil War history after she traced her family's roots to the 16th century. She never imagined she'd find so many soldiers from the area -- and that their personal stories would yield so much sadness.

She writes: Some men enlisted but did not make it to war. Francis Case died in November 1864 while on guard duty in Hastings. He fell off the boat and drowned. George Abraham was a farm boy from Rosemount when he enlisted at age 17 as a drummer. Four months later he was captured during the siege of Petersburg and died in the Andersonville prison before he turned 18. Frederick Raymond received a 'Dear John' letter and committed suicide. George Arnold came home on furlough for a sick child and was murdered.

Dalaska is finding oddities, too, such as women who masqueraded as men to enlist, in some cases being discovered only when they gave birth or when surgeons disrobed them at field hospitals.

One father enlisted with his five sons, two of whom later died in battle. Some of the volunteers, in their 40s and 50s, were considered old men. Others were mere boys, like Henry Schmidt, who came from Germany at age 15 and enlisted in 1861. Schmidt waved a Union flag during the siege of Vicksburg after the color bearer was shot.

Another German immigrant, Herman Voigt, returned to Hastings and lived for seven decades after the war, dying in 1938 at age 102. He had come to the United States in 1852 to train as a mechanic, but left Hastings for St. Louis because he couldn't find work in his trade. He twice voted for Abraham Lincoln for president. He fought in major battles like Shiloh, was discharged as a captain and farmed in Hastings.

Germans were the leading immigrant group in Hastings and Dakota County, Thury Smith said. Most of the others came from Ireland, England and Scandinavia.

Historians say Minnesota was the first state to answer Lincoln's call to arms after the Confederate shelling of Fort Sumter in 1861. Gov. Alexander Ramsey, who was in Washington at that very moment, volunteered 1,000 Minnesotans. The Dakota County Volunteers, one of 10 original companies of that fighting force, organized in Hastings.

As Dalaska digs, she finds more and more personality for her book, including evidence that some Hastings residents enlisted in Confederate armies:

Carl Torbensen helped search for the Jesse James gang in Northfield. George Towner's New York regiment is credited with firing the last cannonball of the war. Richard Washington was a nephew of George Washington. ... He returned to Virginia to fight with the Confederates and died at Gettysburg. Richard Wilkenson fought in the Mexican War of 1846. He was also discharged at Fort Snelling and settled here. He enlisted in the Civil War. In February 1899 at age 87 he had a collision with a street car in St. Paul and died.

So far, Dalaska has found 84 Hastings-area men who died in the war, including some with the legendary First Minnesota Regiment at Gettysburg.

Hastings was a recruiting center during the war, teeming with young men who arrived there by river and rail. Their obituaries often don't mention the Civil War despite its major disruption of their lives, Thury Smith said.

"Maybe by the time they were older they just didn't talk about it," she said.

Kevin Giles • 651-298-1554