The Civil War of the United States was fought from 1861 to 1865 and yet, 160 years later, we are still fighting issues of the unity and principles of what it means to be an American.  Throughout their lifetimes, veterans of the Civil War were instrumental in their promotion of national unity, always active in commemorations such as Memorial Day.

Washington Territory did not send troops to the Civil War but afterward, over many years’ time, Civil War veterans migrated out to Seattle.  They were active in public life in Seattle, always patriotic and contributing to their community.  Under the Civil War category here on my blog, my purpose is to highlight the lives of these veterans and their sacrificial service.

This blog post will outline the life of Edward Lind, a Norwegian immigrant who fought in the Civil War, became part of western migration and came to the City of Seattle.  He is buried in Seattle’s Grand Army of the Republic Cemetery dedicated to Civil War veterans.

In 1915 a sensation was set off in a residential section of the Fremont neighborhood in Seattle when it was learned that 75-year-old Edward Lind was going to marry again, and that the bride, Jennie Clark, was nearly the same age.  A news article said that “the romance of the aged couple, born of neighborly chats, was kept secret until Lind applied for a marriage license.”  The clerk of the marriage license office in downtown Seattle just happened to be Claude F. Gage, who lived across the street from Edward Lind in Fremont.

Mr. Gage, the clerk of marriage licenses, stated that “even he had no inkling that Cupid was making work for him.”  On the wedding night, “the newlyweds were treated to an old-fashioned shivaree by the tin pan-laden populace of 43^rd & Aurora.”  Shivaree was the custom of banging pots outside the home of newlyweds and clamoring to be invited in for a party.  It was reported that the bride and groom graciously responded and invited everyone in for ice cream.

What was noted which was even more astounding, was that this was the fourth marriage for each of Edward & Jennie.  Each of them had loved and had been bereaved three times before.

Edward Lind’s third marriage

Edward Lind had lived on Fremont Avenue from about 1900 until 1911 when he married Lucinda Clogston of 818 North 43^rd Street, and moved to her house.  This was Lind’s third marriage.

We note that Edward Lind’s son-in-law Adolph Malke, a German immigrant, signed as a witness on the marriage certificate, indicating family support and that Lind’s daughter Annie and her family stayed close to her father in Seattle.

At the time of this marriage, Edward was 70 years old and Lucinda was 58, but she lived only two years longer and died in February 1913.

The Grand Army of the Republic in Seattle

By the 1890s there were enough Civil War veterans in Seattle to form two groups which met in various locations.  In that era there were a lot of “fraternal halls” which were places that groups could meet.  One was the Independent Order of Odd Fellows (IOOF) which was a benefit association which sold cemetery plots.  The IOOF built their own building in the Fremont neighborhood and supported their organization with the rentals of the storefronts at sidewalk level.   The Odd Fellows meeting hall was upstairs.

In the era when Edward Lind lived in Fremont, the Odd Fellows had a wood-frame building which had been constructed in 1891.  In 1927 the Odd Fellows built the present building (not now under Odd Fellows ownership) at 3501 Fremont Ave N.

Civil War veterans and widows

Edward Lind’s third wife Lucinda Clogston was the widow of another Civil War veteran, John D. Clogston.

At age 24 in August 1862, John Clogston enlisted to serve in the Civil War with the 9th Regiment, New Hampshire Infantry.   On the 13th of December, 1862, Clogston was wounded in battle at Fredericksburg, Virginia, losing part of his right hand.  His injury was so severe that he was discharged on February 6, 1863.

John Clogston later moved to Michigan, in the pattern of Civil War veterans who tended to move westward.  He married Lucinda in Michigan in October 1889 and they moved immediately to Seattle, where John Clogston was listed as living in the Fremont neighborhood when the Veterans Census of 1890 was conducted.

The Fremont neighborhood of Seattle was established in the summer of 1888 in something like a land rush, with everyone arriving at the same time and building their community together.   The community was economically successful as the developers of Fremont had thought of everything, including the establishment of businesses to provide jobs.  About a year after Fremont got going as a community, it benefited even more by providing lumber, iron, and other building materials to the downtown area (about four miles away) after Seattle’s Great Fire of June 6, 1889.

We might guess that while they were in Michigan John & Lucinda Clogston heard of the jobs boom for the rebuilding after the Fire, so they came to Seattle around the end of the year 1889.  Over the next fifteen years, there were Seattle newspaper notations of vacant lots purchased by the Clogstons and it appears that they were building houses and selling them for income.

A Seattle Times newspaper article of January 1903 recounted that John Clogston had applied for a permit to build a house near Green Lake, but the permit office found that the street had no name.  The building inspector presented it to the Seattle City Council to pass an ordinance for the street name, and Clogston Place was chosen.

The street still exists today, with only three houses on it.  Sadly the newspaper article of 1903 called John Clogston “an unknown” who’d “had fame thrust upon him” by the street-naming.  They did not know that Clogston was a veteran of the greatest crisis of US history, the Civil War, not really an “unknown” in history.

John & Lucinda Clogston were active in the life of the community of the Fremont neighborhood and the Grand Army of the Republic group of Civil War veterans.  The John F. Miller post of the GAR which had been established in 1886 in Seattle, often met around north Seattle for the convenience of the members, including at the Odd Fellows Temple in Fremont.

John Clogston died at age 71 in 1909 and is buried in Lake View Cemetery on Seattle’s Capitol Hill.  His newspaper death notice said that he was a member of the Fremont Lodge of the IOOF and a member of the John F. Miller Post of the GAR.  His funeral was held in the Odd Fellows Temple at Fremont.

John Clogston’s widow Lucinda continued to live at 818 North 43rd Street and when she married Edward Lind in 1911, he moved into that house with her.

A new romance and a fourth marriage 

After the death of his third wife Lucinda in 1913, Edward Lind continued to manage his real estate investments while living in the close-knit neighborhood on North 43^rd Street at the corner of Aurora Avenue.  At that time, Aurora was a quiet residential street lined with houses, as Aurora was not made into a highway until 1932.

With only the hint that “the romance was born of neighborly chats” in Fremont, we may use our imagination as to how Edward Lind and Jennie Clark became acquainted, leading to their marriage in 1915.

There was a corner grocery, Cheadle’s, at 38^th & Aurora and it is likely that Edward & Jennie might often have seen one another while going to and from the store.  In those days before refrigeration, it was common to buy only small amounts of food to use quickly, which necessitated near-daily trips to the market.

In the early 1900s a corner grocery store kept staple supplies like flour, sugar and coffee, but not a lot of fresh food.  Fremont’s shoppers would go to North 34th Street to visit a fresh market for fruits and vegetables, and a butcher shop for meat.  There were many other small shops in Fremont such as drugstores, household supply and hardware stores.  We may imagine Edward & Jennie out and about, falling into step with one another on the way home from the store and getting acquainted as they did their shopping and errands.

It is also possible that Edward Lind had met Jennie before she moved to Fremont or at least had known her husband who was also a Civil War veteran.  Charles J. Clark, Jennie’s third husband, had served with the 2nd Regiment, Ohio Heavy Artillery, Company C.  Like many other Civil War veterans, he migrated westward and was in Seattle for the census of veterans conducted in 1890.

In the early 1890s the Clarks lived in South Seattle and for that reason they may not have been in the same chapter of the Grand Army of the Republic veterans of the Civil War group with Edward Lind in Fremont.  However, it is possible that Lucinda Clogston Lind and the future Jennie Clark Lind had attended the same social events held by the Womens Auxiliary groups of the GAR.

In June 1917 a newspaper report told of the neighborhood gathering hosted by Edward & Jennie Lind at their Fremont home, 818 North 43^rd Street, for their two-year wedding anniversary.  “Music and elocution selections entertained the guests.”  These might have been speeches, memorized passages from literature or recitals of poetry.  There might have been other Civil War veterans at this gathering who sang old patriotic songs.

Life in Fremont in the early 1900s

Fremont was a very convenient neighborhood with food outlets and many other resources, including Seattle’s very first branch library in 1903.

Fremont had streetcar lines, churches and social gathering places such fraternal lodges.  Incredibly the neighborhood did not have taverns because of the two-mile no-alcohol perimeter extending from the University of Washington all the way over to Fremont.

This no-alcohol-perimeter law was introduced by Fremont resident Capt. AJ Goddard in 1895 when he served in the state legislature.  Goddard was a member of the Good Templars fraternal organization advocating abstinence from alcohol.  They had a meeting room in Fremont at North 35^th Street & Albion Avenue in a building which Goddard owned.

Fremont had its own school beginning at the establishment of the neighborhood in 1888, but the school was privately run as Fremont was still outside the Seattle City Limits.  At first the school moved from one rented room to another.  Finally, when Fremont became part of Seattle in 1891, neighborhood booster and real estate agent B.F. Day gave land for the purpose of building a school.  He required that the new building be built of brick and that it would not be a temporary structure.

B.F. Day’s requirements for a sturdy and fireproof school building may have been based upon his experiences in the City of Seattle in the 1880s, when there were frequent fires.  The Central School at Sixth & Madison in downtown, burned down in 1888 and on June 6, 1889, Seattle’s Great Fire burned a swath of the business district around what is now Pioneer Square.

In Fremont, the school named for B.F. Day opened in September 1892.  Its solid construction and its permanence attracted families to live in Fremont.  B.F. Day is today the longest continuously-operating school in Seattle at the same location, in the 3900 block between Fremont & Linden Avenues.

The Ballard neighborhood of Seattle became renowned for its many Scandinavian immigrants but actually there were quite a few in the Fremont neighborhood, as well.  Many were carpenters & building contractors, local merchants, workers in the streetcar system or in local industries such as the Bryant Lumber Mill.  Fremont became known as a hospitable neighborhood for families, where there was a school, churches and a shopping district but no taverns.

When he settled in the Fremont neighborhood circa the year 1900, Edward Lind would have been able to find many other Scandinavian immigrants and he could participate in a Civil War veterans group, as well.  Washington Territory had not sent any soldiers to the Civil War of 1861-1865 but like Edward Lind, in years following many veterans came to the Pacific Northwest. It is possible that Lind knew of some veterans who had preceded him in moving to Seattle and perhaps that influenced his decision to come.

Edward Lind: from immigrant to infantry

Edward Lind had been born in Norway in 1840 and came to the USA with his parents in 1852. They settled on a farm in Wisconsin until the Civil War broke out in 1861, changing their lives forever.

Edward, age 21, and his brother Charles, age 30, enlisted in the Wisconsin Infantry which became known as the Iron Brigade because of these soldiers’ staunch resistance in battle.  Charles was wounded in the Battle of Antietam, Maryland, on September 17, 1862 and because of his injuries he “mustered out” of the infantry in February 1863.

The Iron Brigade of Wisconsin spent most of the war in Virginia, Maryland and Pennsylvania, trying to prevent Confederate troops from advancing on Washington, D.C.

At Gainesville, Virginia (now called Brawner’s Farm) on August 28, 1862, the brigade was attacked by the Confederate troops of General Stonewall Jackson.  At Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, in the epic battle which took place from July 1 to 3, 1863, the Iron Brigade played a key role in the victory of Union forces. Over those three hot summer days the Union Army fought off the Confederate forces of General Robert E. Lee, which proved to be a turning point in the war.

During the battle of Gettysburg, Wisconsin’s Iron Brigade pushed back the Confederates on one side known as Seminary Ridge.  Of the 1,883 men in the Wisconsin units, 1,153 were killed at Gettysburg (61%) leaving about 750 survivors. The valiant stand of the Wisconsin Brigade allowed the other units of the Union army to consolidate on the high ground south of Gettysburg, in areas known as Round Top, Little Round Top, Cemetery Ridge and Culp’s Hill.

Edward Lind was wounded in both of the key battles of Gainesville and Gettysburg but his intense loyalty to his unit caused him to forge onward.  He stayed with his Wisconsin Iron Brigade until his official date of discharge in November 1863.  (See the last section of this blog article for a description of the day of battle at Gettysburg in which Edward Lind was wounded.)

After Lind left the Union Army, the surviving Wisconsin members were combined with other states’ units and were there at Appomattox, Virginia, on April 9, 1865, when the war ended with the surrender by Confederate General Lee.  The Union soldiers marched on to Washington, D.C. for victory celebrations.

After his discharge from war service Edward Lind returned to his Wisconsin farm home for a few years.  Then, like so many other Civil War veterans, he began a western migration.

Westward to Seattle

Many Civil War veterans moved westward in the 1870s and 1880s and we may speculate on the reasons why.  Some were motivated to get land claims which would be given to them in reward for their Civil War service (for Union veterans only).  These land claims could be used for farming, mining or other development purposes. Edward Lind obtained a land claim of 160 acres back home in Wisconsin but by 1880 Edward, his first wife Mary and their children were in Lincoln County, Nebraska, on a farm there, along with Edward’s brother Charles and his family.

After Mary died, Edward continued his westward migration and began working in the mining industry.  In 1896 Edward Lind married Alice Dorsey in Idaho.  By the year 1900 the couple were in Seattle and were living on Fremont Avenue, a few blocks north of the main business district.

We may imagine that since Edward & Alice Lind were getting older (about age 60) they might have wanted the convenience of the city and perhaps wanted to move to a city where there would be good opportunities for their adult children to find work.  Several of Edward Lind’s children migrated to Seattle.  Edward’s son, E.T. Lind, had been working in Colorado before coming to Seattle circa 1905, where he became a streetcar driver.  E.T. married in 1907 with the ceremony held at the home of a friend in the Fremont neighborhood.  E.T. and his family later moved to Lake Burien in south Seattle where E.T. worked at the City Light Power Plant.

Edward & Alice had been married about twelve years when she died in 1908.  Alice is buried in the Grand Army of the Republic Cemetery in Seattle, a cemetery for Civil War veterans and their wives.

The Grand Army of the Republic (GAR) was founded in 1866 in Springfield, Illinois, and gradually spread nationwide, for veterans of the Civil War.  The GAR was influential in advocating for veteran’s benefits and for establishing Memorial Day, originally to commemorate the Civil War.

The first GAR group in Seattle was founded in 1878 and named Stevens Post No. 1 in tribute to Isaac Stevens, a territorial governor who had been killed in the Civil War.  A womens auxiliary group was founded in Seattle in 1885 by Viola Kenyon, who with her husband, Captain DeWitt C. Kenyon of Michigan, is another example of veterans who migrated Out West.

As long as Civil War veterans were still living in Seattle, they participated every year in sending representatives to schools to lead patriotic programs on Memorial Day.  It was noted in the Seattle newspaper in 1917 that Edward Lind was on a team of four veterans sent to Ravenna School for that year’s Memorial Day observance.  On each team, two men were from the Stevens Post of the Grand Army of the Republic and two were from the Miller Post.  Charles B. Kittredge of the University District in Seattle, is another example of a veteran who came to Seattle later in life and was very active in the Grand Army of the Republic.

Finding a community in Fremont

As he moved westward, Edward Lind transitioned from farming into the work of land development for mining operations.  Seattle in the early 1900s was a center for the offices of mining companies, with 133 of them listed in the City Directory, and that may be one of the reasons that Lind chose to come to Seattle to live in his later years.  Lind continued to manage his mining holdings and he also bought and sold real estate in Seattle.

In 1911 at age 70, Edward Lind married for the third time.  Lucinda Clogston lived at 818 North 43^rd Street in Fremont and Edward moved into her house.  Their happiness was brief, as Lucinda died only two years later.  She is buried at Lake View Cemetery next to her former husband John Clogston.

Edward Lind, Civil War veteran delgate to the reunion of 1913

The bereaved Edward Lind had something else to occupy him in that year of 1913 after Lucinda’s death.  Lind was among 25 Civil War veterans in Seattle, out of a total of 135 delegates from the state of Washington, who would travel back to Pennsylvania that summer for a reunion commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of the battle at Gettysburg.  There the veterans could re-create their old units and reconnect with their comrades.

The Gettysburg reunion of July 1913 was the last “big one” as the veterans were aging, with most over the age of 70 as Edward Lind was.  But the purpose of the Gettysburg event was not just for reunion purposes.  Like Lind who was active in the Grand Army of the Republic organization in Seattle, veterans hoped that all Americans would remember the high price that had been paid for keeping the Union together and the dedication shown by their commitment to the American identity.

Then in June 1915 came the report which was picked up by Seattle newspapers, of a fourth marriage for Edward Lind, who had seen so much of love and loss in his lifetime.  His late-in-life marriage showed the true resilience of this man who had survived the great battles of the Civil War, had lived through the death of loved ones and who continued to look ahead for meaning, purpose and happiness, no matter his age.  We note that Edward Lind’s third and fourth wives had previously been married to Civil War veterans, showing the close bond of fellowship among those who lived through the life-changing event of the war.

At his death in 1921, four of Edward Lind’s surviving five children were living in Seattle.  Despite their migration across the USA over many years’ time, the family stayed close to their father.  Edward Lind died while on a trip to California to visit another daughter there.

Edward Lind lived a very full life, from his immigrant beginnings, to true American patriotism in the Civil War, to a participant in Western migration and the vibrant growth of the City of Seattle.  Lind is buried in the Grand Army of the Republic Cemetery on Capitol Hill in Seattle.

Sources:

Census and City Directory listings; Washington Digital Archives for dates of birth, death, and marriage; Find A Grave for locations of gravesites.

Library of Congress, Civil War Photos:  John F. Miller, 29th Indiana.

HistoryLink Essays:

#1669, “Business and Industry in Seattle in 1900,” by James R. Warren, 1999.

#3308, “B.F. Day Elementary School Opens in Fremont (Seattle) in September 1892,” by Priscilla Long, 2001.

#3968, “The Seattle Public Library’s first branch officially opens in Fremont on February 2, 1903,” by David Wilma, 2002.

#8940, “Washington State Legislature passes law prohibiting the sale of alcohol on the University of Washington campus in Seattle on March 19, 1895,” by Jennifer Ott, 2009.

News articles:

“Seattle Will Send Large Delegation to Gettysburg Reunion.”  Seattle Sunday Times, May 18, 1913, page 8.

“Edward Lind, 75 Years Old, Takes Fourth Bride.”  Seattle Daily Times, June 18, 1915, page 3.

“Marriage Anniversary Celebrated.”  Seattle Sunday Times, June 24, 1917, page 64.

“Edward Lind to be Buried Here.”  Seattle Post-Intelligencer, October 16, 1921, page 16.

Civil War information:

Some of the websites I accessed for background reading on the Civil War are:  Civil War Talk; Essential Civil War Curriculum/the Iron Brigade.

CivilWarTalk.com/threads/regiments-that-fought-at-gettysburg.136332/ This thread of February 27, 2017, quotes from the book “In the Bloody Railroad Cut at Gettysburg:  The 6^th Wisconsin in the Iron Brigade,” by Lance J. Herdeger and William J.K. Beaudot, 1990.

Note that in this quote below, describing the 6^th Wisconsin’s participation in battle on July 1, 1863 at Gettysburg, the Confederate troops are also referred to as “rebels” because the secession from the United States was called The Rebellion.  The Confederate troops wore gray uniforms.   The Union troops were sometimes called federals since they represented the U.S. government, and were “men in blue” for their uniforms.

“The Sixth Wisconsin had been left behind as a reserve near the Seminary as the rest of the Iron Brigade advanced and fought in McPherson’s Woods. Lieutenant Colonel Rufus Dawes must have chafed to see the other Iron Brigade regiments engaged while his own men were busy building a barricade of split rails. But Dawes and the Sixth Wisconsin did not have long to wait for action.

Cutler’s brigade was being driven back in disorder and the right of the Union line was about to collapse. The surging Confederates would then be in position to advance on the flank and move in behind the rest of the Iron Brigade in the McPherson Woods. It was a critical moment, and Abner Doubleday, who had succeeded to command of the First Corps when Reynolds was killed, urgently sent for Dawes and the Sixth Wisconsin to “come like hell.”

As the men of the Sixth Wisconsin advanced, a group of officers carrying a blanket with the body of John Reynolds crossed their path. It must have been a sobering experience. They soon came under fire. A bullet hit Dawes’s horse and he went down. In an instant, Dawes was on his feet and the men cheered. The regiment advanced and took a position along a fence bordering the Chambersburg Pike. Dawes ordered his men to fire.

“In the field, beyond the turnpike, a long line of yelling rebels could be seen running forward and firing,” Dawes later wrote, “and our troops of Cutler’s brigade were running back in disorder. The fire of our carefully aimed muskets, resting on the fence rails, soon checked the rebels in their headlong pursuit.”

Captain Lloyd Harris remembered that “when the enemy discovered us coming, they gave up the pursuit of Cutler’s men and wheeled to the right to meet [us] … I could not help thinking now, for once, we will have a square ‘stand up and knock down fight.’ No trees, no walls to protect either, when presto! their whole line disappeared as if swallowed up by the earth.”

Quickly sizing up the situation, Captain Dawes realized that the advantage had swung toward the men in blue. He ordered his men to charge the cut.

The battle flag of the Sixth Wisconsin surged forward, the men advancing with it. The men of the neighboring Fourteenth Brooklyn and Ninety-Fifth New York joined the advance as well. Great gaps were torn in the advancing line from the murderous fire from the Confederates who had taken refuge in the railroad cut. “Men were falling by the twenties and thirties, and breaking ranks by falling or running.”

As Dawes would later describe it, “With the colors at the advance point, the regiment firmly and hurriedly moved forward, while the whole field behind streamed with men who had been shot, and who were struggling to the rear or sinking in death upon the ground.” Dawes was yelling, “Align on the colors! Close up on the colors!”

In the 175 yards between the turnpike and the railroad cut, 180 men of the Sixth Wisconsin went down, dead or wounded. One of them later recorded the carnage: “Andy Miller of Company I falls dead, near him Gottlieb Schreiber wounded, but a few yards more and Boughton is killed, then Sweet falls wounded. Then Jim McLane and Alf. Thompson are wounded. Now Sutton falls dead, Goodwin and Charlie Jones are wounded. They reach the railroad cut and Levi Steadman drops dead and Edward Lind is wounded.”