Minnesota Historical Society looks to the future

Henry Mills held on to the shirt that saved his life for the rest of his long life.

It was a dead man's shirt. Likely wrestled off a fallen Confederate soldier on an icy Nashville battlefield in the bitter December of 1864. Mills took the shirt and wrapped it tight around the bleeding bullet wound in his leg.

He lost the leg but kept the shirt. It came home with him to Minnesota — first to Fort Snelling, where Lt. Henry L. Mills mustered out of the 7th Minnesota Volunteer Infantry, then home to St. Paul.

No matter how many times the Mills family washed the battered shirt, the bloodstains remained. But instead of burning the thing or cutting it into rags so he wouldn't be reminded of the pain and fear of those days, Mills carried this piece of his past into the future.

The collections at the Minnesota Historical Society are full of cherished mementos donated by veterans of the Civil War.

"These guys, they lost a lot of friends. They were really trying to remember the people they lost, more than anything," said Sondra Reierson, senior curator of 3-D objects at the Minnesota Historical Society. "I think it was less about remembering being wounded and more about surviving, and remembering who else he lost."

Right now, Minnesotans who made it through the past year and a half of pandemic, injustice, isolation and grief may be looking around now at the things they carried out of 2020. The piles of masks, the protest signs, the hoarded hand sanitizer, the children's Zoom homework assignments, the recipe for sourdough starter. They may be wondering how much of it they want to carry into 2022 and beyond.

In the worst days of 2020, as historic sites closed and waves of furloughs and layoffs hit Minnesota Historical Society staff, MNHS was urging Minnesotans to be mindful of the history we're living through.

The History Is Now project collected personal narratives from the anti-racism uprising and the COVID lockdown. Hearts, decorated by visitors, fluttered outside historic sites to bring people close even when it wasn't safe to be together.

Historians offered tips for anyone trying to put together a time capsule to remember the days that are already starting to feel like a bad dream. Did we really hoard all that toilet paper? Stand on our doorsteps and bang pots and pans for the first responders?

Before it all fades, the historians say, look for the objects that tell a story.

Objects like an ordinary shirt, worn and frayed and dark with the blood of its last two owners.

If you look closely, you can see the faint embroidery on the pockets, spelling out the initials J.B.

Maybe the initials were stitched by a mother or a sweetheart. Maybe some future historian will comb through the casualty lists of the Battle of Nashville and put a name to the soldier who never came home.

"This shirt saved the life of a Minnesota soldier," Reierson said. The fact that Mills survived his battlefield wounds in an era before germ theory is matched by the miracle that the shirt survived the next century and a half. "That's pretty stunning."

The Mills family, who kept the shirt safe and beautifully preserved for 157 years, donated it to the Minnesota Historical Society last week. It will go on display in the new visitor center opening next year at Historic Fort Snelling at Bdote, along with a newly acquired U.S. Cavalry uniform worn by young Grover Cleveland Cooper when he was stationed at Fort Snelling in 1906. Cooper slept in the cavalry barracks that became the new visitor center.

Chris Belland, program and outreach manager for veteran relations at the Minnesota Historical Society, knows — both as a historian and as a soldier himself — how rare it is for museums to receive everyday treasures like this one. The shirt off a soldier's back, the sort of object a soldier would have worn to tatters.

"It's adding to the stories we already tell," said Belland, who spent part of 2020 deployed overseas with the Minnesota Army National Guard. "Every day I've worked [at Historic Fort Snelling] I've talked about military stories, from uniforms and buttons to military tactics … It just adds to the story we can tell there."

The story of Henry Mills, who was about 31 years old at the Battle of Nashville, had many more chapters after his Civil War years. He came home, raised a family and lived to see a brand-new century. He served as state arsenal keeper, ran a grocery, and was elected Justice of the Peace. Born in 1833, he died in 1925 at the age of 92.

You can read more of Mills' story in his own words, in the archives of the Minnesota History Center in St. Paul. The doors are open to the public again. Just like Fort Snelling, just like the Split Rock Lighthouse, the Jeffers Petroglyphs, the Birch Coulee Battlefield, the W.W. Mayo House and all the other sites Minnesotans haven't been able to visit in more than a year.

Some of the hours have changed and some pandemic restrictions are still in place. But the Minnesota Historical Society, like everybody else, is looking to the future.

To find out what's open and what's happening at sites around the state, visit: mnhs.org/covid-19

jennifer.brooks@startribune.com • 612-673-4008

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