Brazos Santiago Revisited

One of the earliest posts on this blog concerns the outpost on the island of Brazos Santiago where I'm convinced that my great great grandfather was stationed when he fell ill. He was apparently sent from there across the Gulf of Mexico and up the Mississippi to the hospital at Jefferson Barracks in St. Louis where he died and was buried among the Civil War casualties on July 27, 1865, shortly before Jefferson Barracks became a National Cemetery.

I mention it again here because a few days ago I found a website put together by a descendant of another soldier who was stationed on Brazos Santiago and managed to survive the war. If you scroll a little more than midway through Al Shelton's Family Album you can see a nicely reproduced photo that features the wife and family of Miles Whitehall, a former slave from North Carolina whose Colored Infantry regiment served much of the two years of his enlistment on Brazos Santiago. Al Shelton's web page indicates that Miles Whitehall was 33 years old in 1864 when he enlisted and his absence from the family album suggests that he was no longer alive in 1910. If he had lived that long he would have been 81 years old. His family apparently collected a monthly disability or death benefit as the result of "scurvy" that he suffered from during and presumably after his enlistment. Much of the information Al has about his family comes from the paperwork filed in order to collect that pension.

My great great grandfather, Wilhelm Lubach, didn't survive the war, but it appears that his brother-in-law, August Heise, did. They both served in the 27th Wisconsin Volunteer Infantry Regiment. Pension records for Civil War veterans in Sheboygan County in 1883 show that August Heise was collecting ten dollars a month in disability compensation for the "chronic diarrhea" that no doubt served as a reminder of his Civil War adventure nearly twenty years earlier.