The following excerpt is from the July 29, 2014 edition of tribtown.com:
FORT WAYNE, Indiana — Civil War Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman once said, “War is hell.”
Spencerville author and historical researcher Margaret Hobson says that was perhaps never more true than during that war, now marking its sesquicentennial.
For the past two decades, the 71-year-old retired Fort Wayne Community Schools math teacher has been compiling exhaustive information on one small part of the Civil War – the men of Indiana’s 44th regiment who faced their singular versions of hell after mustering for the Union at Fort Wayne’s Camp Allen in November 1861.
The soldiers, Hobson says, thought they were signing up for a brief adventure, a chance to leave northeast Indiana behind and see the world.
“The men thought it would be a six-week affair, that the Union would win easily, and they thought they would be home to plant crops in the spring. They didn’t realize it would be four years,”…
