EXCEPTIONAL WOMAN
Annie Wittenmyer fought many battles, helped countless men, women, children
The Women’s Christian Temperance Union held its 2017 national convention July 25 to 27 in Harrisburg. So, on Thursday, July 26, about 60 WCTU members boarded charter buses in the state capital and traveled to Pottstown to visit Edgewood Cemetery and to honor the memory of Annie Wittenmyer, the organization’s first president.
The WCTU members who gathered around Wittenmyer’s grave wore identification tags that revealed they came from many states, traveling a long way to pay tribute to a truly exceptional person, Annie Wittenmyer.
When readers of The Pottstown Daily Ledger unfolded their morning newspapers on Friday, Feb. 2, 1900, the first item that commanded their attention was a front-page headline proclaiming a “Famous Woman’s Sudden Death.” The famous woman was Sarah Ann Wittenmyer of Lower Pottsgrove Township.
Though Annie — the name by which she was always known — left this world in Sanatoga, she entered it on Aug. 26, 1827, hundreds of miles to the west at her maternal grandfather’s home near Sandy Springs, Ohio.
Wittenmyer was the oldest child of John G. Turner and his wife, Catherine, who lived in Flemming County, Ky. Her maternal grandfather, Simeon Smith Jr., a graduate of Princeton University, oversaw Annie’s education and, in addition to sending her to a female seminary in Ohio, also had her tutored in mathematics, astronomy, and foreign languages.
In 1847, Annie married widower William Wittenmyer, a wealthy merchant from Jacksonville, Ohio. Three years later the couple moved to Keokuk, Iowa, a booming but rough-and-tumble town on the Mississippi River
Annie, in her early 20s, was a well-educated and intelligent woman, strong in will and body and full of energy. But the social order in mid-19th century America allowed her few avenues for self-fulfillment outside the home.
But she made the best of what was available. Keokuk, a town in its infancy, had no public schools. In April 1853, Wittenmyer filled this void by hiring a teacher and starting in her home a tuitionfree school for underprivileged children. The school expanded so rapidly the operation was quickly moved to a warehouse.
A Sunday school at the same warehouse followed and this evolved into the Chatham Square Church, which grew into one of Keokuk’s largest congregations.
These years before the Civil War brought personal tragedy to the young matron as death ravaged her family, claiming oneby-one four of her five children, and then, in 1860, her husband. At 33, Wittenmyer was left a widow with one son, Charles Albert.
Less than a year after the death of her husband the Civil War broke out. Years later she recalled “camps and hospitals were established near my own home… I began at once ministrations to the sick in these newly established hospitals.”
Her initial involvement was modest. She helped found the Keokuk Ladies’ Soldiers’ Aid Society, and it was as the society’s
representative that she made her first visit to soldiers’ camps.
While in a one of those camps in April 1861 she wrote a letter listing the supplies urgently needed that found its way into the pages of several Iowa newspapers. It brought an enthusiastic response, and by the time she returned to Keokuk 10 days later enough supplies had arrived to fill a steamboat.
During the first year of the war, Wittenmyer officially served as general agent for the Keokuk society she helped to create, but the job she did was much broader.
She apparently functioned as an ad hoc agent for aid societies throughout the state, personally coordinating delivery of supplies to soldiers’ camps and hospitals in Iowa, Missouri, and Tennessee.
In January 1862, she went with a load of supplies to a large Union hospital in Sedalia, Mo., where she entered a “large, long room filled with cots,” and “on each cot lay a sick or wounded soldier.”
Years later she wrote, “Glancing down the room I saw one of my own brothers, a lad of sixteen (David Turner).” She had thought, she wrote, “he was a hundred miles away.”
Her brother was seriously ill with typhoid fever. A doctor held little hope, telling Annie, “If he can have good care and nursing his recovery is possible, but not probable.”
Annie, who never gave up on anything, wasn’t about to abandon her brother. She spent a week tending to him, never even leaving his side. David recovered, served unharmed for the rest of the war and went on to make a life as a rancher and gold mine owner in Montana.
In April 1862, the Iowa legislature authorized Wittenmyer’s appointment as one of two official Iowa State Sanitary Agents. The bill marked the first time a woman was specifically named in an official Iowa state document.
In addition to traveling hundreds of miles by steamboat and train to distribute supplies and spending hours corresponding with Iowa state aid groups, Wittenmyer was now in charge of procuring leaves and medical discharges for Iowa soldiers. She also assumed the onerous duty of writing letters to the families of wounded and dead soldiers.
In 1863, she received a letter collectively written by a group of soldiers in an Iowa hospital. The men told Wittenmyer that while they were grateful for all the “kindness shown us, we prefer that you would forget about us.”
Their real concern was “our wives and children, our mothers and sister[s], who are depended upon us for their support.” “Succor them,” they asked, “and hold your charity from us.”
The letter spurred Wittenmyer to found a home for Iowa war orphans. She presented the idea to a convention of state aid societies in October 1863, in Muscatine, Iowa, where it was adopted. The first home was opened in Farmington in the summer of 1864; a second followed in 1865 in Cedar Falls.
However, when the number of eligible children exceeded the available space, Wittenmyer went to Washington, D.C., where she persuaded Secretary of War Edwin Stanton to donate an unused cavalry barracks on 30 acres of land in Davenport, Iowa, and $6,000 worth of supplies for another home.
Wittenmyer’s most valuable contribution to the Union war effort came in December 1863. In her estimation, “No part of the army service was so defective, during the 2 years of the war, as the cooking department of the United States Government.”
In her bill of condemnation, she wrote, “Few of the men employed as cooks were trained or skilled.” The sick, she contended, were not getting proper food because army surgeons often forbade the distribution of supplies donated by civilians on the grounds that “something might be given that would endanger (the patients’) lives and retard their recovery.”
“It was under theses trying circumstances that the plan of special diet kitchens came to me — clearly and definitely — as a flash from the skies — like a divine inspiration,” she later wrote.
She “hastened at once to put the plan into execution.” The project was “enthusiastically endorsed” by Abraham Lincoln, by Stanton, by the Surgeon General of U.S. Army, plus officials of the Sanitary and Christian Commissions.
Using Wittenmyer’s plan, fully equipped kitchens were constructed at army hospitals. In each kitchen two dietary nurses supervised a staff of specially trained soldiers. Surgeons were able to order meals specific to the needs of every patient.
The first kitchen went into operation at Cumberland Hospital, Nashville, Tenn. It was so successful that, by the end of the war, Wittenmyer had established 100 kitchens in army hospitals. Some were large enough to produce 4,500 meals a day.
These kitchens no doubt saved thousands of lives during the last 18 months of the war and the surgeon general adopted them into the regular U.S. Army’s hospital system. Administering the kitchens became Wittenmyer’s major role until November 1865, six months after the Civil War ended.
In addition to administrative and organizational work, she often provided hands-on nursing care in hospitals close to the front lines.
Wittenmyer’s first exposure to battle was in 1862 at Shiloh, where she cared for wounded soldiers on a steamer docked at Pittsburgh Landing on the Tennessee River.
In the early morning of April 7, she and her fellow nurses, “shivered to see the wounded lying on bags of grain and…the dead…lying…mangled along the shore of the river.” Their initial reaction was “to cover our faces with our hands in the attempt to hide the horrid sights from our eyes.”
But the women went to work — preparing food, tending the wounded. It wasn’t until 10 p.m. that Wittenmyer was ordered by a surgeon to return to her cabin. “The fine dress (she) had worn that day being so wet and muddy and covered with blood that (she) pitched it into the river.”
Wittenmyer learned what it was like to be under fire every day she was in the field with Grant’s army at the siege of Vicksburg in the spring and summer of 1863.
The quartermaster assigned to her for use as an ambulance a captured carriage decorated with conspicuous finery. After the war, she learned that the Rebels had been told that the fancy conveyance was being used by a Union general to make his rounds. As such, it became a daily target for Confederate sharpshooters. “In most cases the shots fell low, but the wheels were chipped until they became quite a curiosity,” Wittenmyer wrote.
For four-and-a-half years Wittenmyer traveled thousands of miles and it was estimated that about $160,000 worth of goods — including $3,000 of her own — passed through her hands. She was loved and respected by all, from the top echelons of the federal government and military (she counted Lincoln, Grant and William Sherman among her personal friends) to the soldiers in the ranks and civilians.
After the war, her activities continued at the same frenetic pace. In 1868, she and her son moved to Philadelphia to organize home missionary work for the Methodist Church.
There were more projects on her plate. Wittenmyer was selected as the first president of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union at its national convention in 1874 in Cleveland, Ohio.
She served as president for five years, stepping down when the group embraced the fight for women’s suffrage, but she continued to promote the temperance movement, serving for two years as president of the World’s Christian Temperance Union.
In 1883, she helped organize the Women’s Relief Corps, an auxiliary to the Union war veterans’ Grand Army of the Republic. She was elected president of the WRC in 1889 and helped to found a home for mothers, widows, wives, and children of disabled soldiers.
In 1892, she took up the cudgels on behalf of the women who served as army nurses during the Civil War. She traveled to Washington where she spent the winter vigorously lobbying reluctant legislators to grant pensions to these women. After five months of her unrelenting pressure Congress yielded to her demand.
Wittenmyer spent the rest of her life helping nurses cut through government red tape to collect what was due them. By 1900 it was estimated she had steered 655 women through the bureaucratic shoals to their $12-per-month reward.
Her love of literature and writing was kindled early in life, and for 11 years she was the editor of a monthly newspaper and a department editor of The New York Weekly Tribune.
Wittenmyer also wrote poetry and hymns and four books. The last, “Under the Guns,” was completed in Sanatoga in 1894. It contained vignettes of her experiences during the Civil War.
To escape the constant distraction that came from living in Philadelphia, Wittenmyer moved in 1889 to what was then the rural isolation of Lower Pottsgrove. In 1894, she bought 65 acres fronting on the south side of Ridge Pike, just east of Sanatoga Run. In her home, which she christened Zephyrlea Place, she spent the final years of her life.
Her funeral on Feb. 6, 1900, was attended by hundreds, including large contingents from both Pottstown GAR posts and national officers from many organizations that she espoused.
She was laid to rest in Edgewood Cemetery. The tombstone that marks her grave was erected by the Women’s Relief Corps in 1921.