...Martin seemed to improve a bit over the next several days. “I am on the gain a little.” He noted on July 14. “Have steady but not very severe pain.” Three days later, a Sunday, he was carried to the porch to hear the hospital’s Chaplin preach. On the afternoon of July 23 he was lugged aboard a railroad car, the hospital was moving again. But the train sat motionless overnight and did not pull away until the following morning, when it swayed south to Vining’s Station.
There the hospital tent city was set up in another grove alongside the railroad, and headquarters were established in a plantation house just vacated by General Sherman. Once again, Martin and Fannie were assigned a room. “I feel very well until night when I endure much pain,” he wrote. “He is feeling pretty well,” she wrote, “but the flaps have sloughed off his stump and it looks as if the foot had been chopped of though it is beginning to heal some.” she added an ominous note: “Fears are entertained that the stump will never be healthy.” Gangrene had infected the wound.”
An additional cot was set up in the room for the mother of a wounded officer who had come from Ohio to care for her son. The hospital Chaplin often joined the trio for evening prayer meetings. Long lines of ambulances arrived from the front, where Sherman’s men were battling for Atlanta. As new patients filled the hospital, trains loaded with convalescents streamed from the rear. A garden between the house and the main hospital grounds was converted into a cemetery. Soldiers’ corpses, wrapped in blankets with their names and regiments written on scraps of paper pinned to their chests, were bought on bloodstained stretchers and laid in rows awaiting burial. Black swarms of buzzing flies crawled over the inert forms. Every day, Fannie walked each row,and read each name. One night, as the booming of a thunderstorm mingled with distant thudding of artillery, she was overcome by emotion and broke down, weeping bitterly.
Provenance of story:
From “With Relentless Hand – Twelve tales of civil war soldiers," by Mark H. Dunkelman, published 2006 LSU Press p. 46…in part provided to the author by Phil Palen, Collins, N.Y. sharing Marin Bushell’s letters. – Cornell Unv E.D. Northup papers. And to: Fannie Oslin Jackson,(on Both sides of the line by Fannie (Oslin) Jackson 1835-1925: Her early years in Georgia and Civil War Service as a Union Army Nurse. Edited by Joan F. Curran and Rudena K. Mallory. Baltimore, Md: Gateway Press 1989 136pp. From her memoirs dated 1861-1865, Fannie Jackson did not favor nor slavery. Her memoir traces the improvement of one amputee from the time he was placed in her care until he was well enough to be discharged,. By the time the hospital had reached Vining’s Station, Georgia, Fannie had attained the position of matron. She was further verified from The Part Taken by Women in American History, by John A. Logan, Mary Simmerson Cunningham Logan, Pub 1912, The Perry-Nalle Co. p.336.serving 15 months in field hospitals for the Dept of the Cumberland as a registered nurse at Resaca, Big Shanty, Centerville, Vinings Station, and Lookout Mountain.
Provenance of story:
From “With Relentless Hand – Twelve tales of civil war soldiers," by Mark H. Dunkelman, published 2006 LSU Press p. 46…in part provided to the author by Phil Palen, Collins, N.Y. sharing Marin Bushell’s letters. – Cornell Unv E.D. Northup papers. And to: Fannie Oslin Jackson,(on Both sides of the line by Fannie (Oslin) Jackson 1835-1925: Her early years in Georgia and Civil War Service as a Union Army Nurse. Edited by Joan F. Curran and Rudena K. Mallory. Baltimore, Md: Gateway Press 1989 136pp. From her memoirs dated 1861-1865, Fannie Jackson did not favor nor slavery. Her memoir traces the improvement of one amputee from the time he was placed in her care until he was well enough to be discharged,. By the time the hospital had reached Vining’s Station, Georgia, Fannie had attained the position of matron. She was further verified from The Part Taken by Women in American History, by John A. Logan, Mary Simmerson Cunningham Logan, Pub 1912, The Perry-Nalle Co. p.336.serving 15 months in field hospitals for the Dept of the Cumberland as a registered nurse at Resaca, Big Shanty, Centerville, Vinings Station, and Lookout Mountain.
