(as told by Elizabeth Perkins Buchheit)
ELIZABETH WALKER was a volunteer nurse when she met her husband George Francis Perkins. She lived in Illinois near the river. One day in 1863 the word went out that wounded soldiers from the Battle of Vicksburg in Mississippi were arriving on a barge. They had no facilities so they asked to set up the schoolhouse as a hospital and they called for all these girls in the town to help. Great-grandma volunteered as a nurse. She was very young. She said she didn’t know one end of a man from the other. But she found out soon enough. Anyway, that’s where she met George and they were married.
One thing I didn’t know and I heard this recently that one of the reasons that people in the Northern Army were so successful is that so many of their fathers and grandfathers had fought in the Revolution. So they were very, very serious about keeping the country together, the Union together. This meant a lot to them. George’s grandfather was Francis Perkins and he was in the Revolution. So they had a lot of faith in the country. They wanted to keep it and so they fought for it. The other side unfortunately was fighting to retain slavery. Little did they know that England had given up slavery in about 1840.
George Francis Perkins was in the Northern Army, the Michigan 7th which became the US 7th Cavalry, otherwise known as General Custer’s Cavalry. Thank goodness he got out of it before Little Big Horn. If you were in the cavalry, you were gone a lot of the time because you had a way of transportation. Incidentally, George said you could never have a white horse because they could see ‘em at night. Custer was very erratic. He was one of these very restless people. He always wanted to make a foray in the middle of the night. It was kind of exciting I guess.
Note: The Administrator believes Charley Perkins served in the Michigan 7th, not George Francis Perkins. The Michigan 7th fought in The Battle of Gettysburg but not The Battle of Vicksburg. The Administrator believes George Francis served in The Michigan 2nd.
Filed under: Civil War, Perkins, Walker | Tagged: Battle of Gettysburg, Battle of Vicksburg, Civil War, George Francis Perkins, Michigan 2nd, Michigan 7th, Perkins
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