Battles, Military and Domestic: The Garrison–Husband Family
by Dennis Kingery
DGS 2022 Writing Contest Submission: Your family’s black sheep
Among the early settlers of Union County, Iowa was a family of our ancestors who had a difficult life. It was not because they were penniless immigrants or struggling pioneers, although our ancestors surely included some of those. Milton Garrison and Margaret Husband endured trials that we hope never to experience and may not totally appreciate.
Milton and Margaret married in 1856, and soon acquired 80 acres in Union Township from the federal government. Later he also received a patent for 40 acres in Sand Creek Township. They lived there only for a few years, and their daughter Sophia Jane (known as Jen) was born there. By 1860 they were in Jones Township, where they bought 80 acres. Three more children were born there: Francis, James, and Lydia Catherine, known as Kate. We remember Kate in a special way as a great-grandmother.
The Civil War interrupted the lives of this family, as it did to many others at the time. From its population of about 2000, Union County had already contributed some 100 men when President Lincoln asked for more volunteers in the spring of 1862. Milton and his brothers-in-law Jerry Shepherd and Francis Husband enlisted in the new Company H of the 29th Iowa Regiment. This group of 138 was mustered in on 1 December of that year, reducing considerably the number of able-bodied men remaining in the county to carry on farming and business. In the Garrison family, no doubt life was made more complex by the birth of James in February 1863.
Company H saw its first action in the Yazoo Pass Expedition in March, and suffered some losses at the battle of Helena, Arkansas in July of that year. Although Union forces won that battle, the death of Margaret’s brother Francis was a great blow to the family.
A gunshot injury to a toe put Milton in the hospital for about six weeks in the spring, followed by hospitalization with a fever for about two weeks in late summer. His record notes that he was furloughed September 10, deserted October 9, and returned to service October 30. A three-week desertion followed by return seems odd, but his record includes no further explanation and lists no apparent consequences.
During a work assignment as a hospital attendant in 1864, the Confederate Army took him prisoner. He later told tales of escaping from prison with a comrade and of their success in eluding the search by troops with bloodhounds. After his return to his company in February 1865, he was again hospitalized with measles during May. By that time the war was effectively over, and he was discharged May 23.
Some family members recalled that upon his return from the war, he was not the same person. This is not an unusual consequence of wartime experience, and it may have influenced a change in Milton’s personality. The land ownership records include transfers of property from Milton to Margaret in 1866, both a town lot in Afton (17 April)2 and 80 acres in Jones Twp. (11 Aug)3 These actions are simple, but not routine.
Much more surprising is an unusual entry in a land record book. An oath dated 18 August of that year that “I, Milton Garrison, having been guilty of telling and circulating false and slanderous reports respecting the character of Mary Louise White, daughter of John B. White, in that she came to see me at my farm in Jones Township and met me at the Afton Cemetery. This is to confess and state that said reports made and published by me were and are false.“ This peculiar document was accompanied by a statement by J. B. White filed on 26 August that “I hereby agree not to prosecute said M. L. Garrison or commence criminal action against him for damages.”4
As these unique agreements are not quite self-explanatory, conjecture might allow us to presume the underlying circumstances. There was no court action involved, so the two statements’ unexpected placement within land transfer documents could be due to lack of anywhere else to store them. In hindsight, they also foretell seriously unfortunate episodes in Milton’s home life.
Upon returning from the war, he had found work with a freight-hauling company whose route connected Winterset with St. Joseph, Missouri. The hauling was done with a wagon and a team of horses, of course, so the distance of some 160 miles between those cities kept him away from home for days and weeks at a time.
At some point during 1868 he did not return home. It was later revealed that he had started a second family in Missouri during his long absences. The new mother’s family forced Milton to marry her, a child only slightly older than his youngest daughter Kate. The sorry aspect of this story is that Kate had yet not been born when he abandoned the family.
When the details of Milton’s affair became clear, Margaret divorced him. She likely found renters for the farm, but also supported the family by taking in laundry and boarders (such as farm hands, for example). Boarders sleeping in the barn loft were presumably not a year-round option. While a second track was being added to the nearby Chicago Great Western railroad line in 1874, she rented to construction workers. One of these workers was Thomas Bartholomew, whom she married during that year. She and Thomas became the parents of two sons, Andrew and Charles.
In the meantime, Milton was raising a new family under a new name, John Wilson. His new wife was Caroline Crews, whom he had married in 1867, when she was about 15 years of age. (The prior land transfers may have been Milton’s quiet preparation for his anticipated end of his marriage to Margaret.) By 1870 and continuing through the 1880 Census, John Wilson and his new family lived in Harrison County, on the Iowa–Missouri border, some 50 miles east of St. Joseph and directly south of Afton. It is reasonable to presume that the road he used on his usual freight-hauling route had taken him through that area regularly. Did he find room and board in homes along his route? Did he meet little Caroline regularly while on the job? It is possible and likely, but we do not know.
Seven children were born to them before she died in 1881. Two years later he married Mollie Enlow. They became the parents of four more children, one of whom died at a very young age. Mollie died in 1915, according to her son. A paradox arises: the 1910 Census records that John was a widower at that time. For the 1900 and 1910 censuses, he was enumerated in Clay County, part of which is now occupied by Kansas City.
As early as 1899 he applied for a veteran’s pension at the Iowa Soldiers’ Home in Marshalltown, using his original given name and Eldon, Iowa (his childhood home) as his address. In the 1900 Census, he is shown as a resident of both Missouri (as John Wilson) and of Iowa (as Milton Garrison). It appears that he moved from Missouri to the Soldiers’ Home between Missouri’s 7 June enumeration and Iowa’s count of 27 June. Over a period of several succeeding years his documents bore the addresses of various children. He also was a resident of the Soldiers’ Home for a time, living there in the summer and in California in the winter.
Descendants have said that on two occasions he returned to Afton.5 The stories include no dates, but the visits could have occurred during the two years between the death of Caroline and his marriage to Mollie. His seriously deteriorated state of health in later years, including near-blindness and deafness, make the possibility of traveling alone to Afton after the death of his third wife seem quite unlikely.
After inquiring at the post office, he located his two married daughters, Jen Callahan and Kate Fluckey. Jen welcomed him, but Kate, who had never known her father, was quite upset and refused to see him. As the story goes, about three years later (a time span difficult to reconcile with his Missouri marriages) he returned and asked Margaret, then a widow, to marry him again. She wanted nothing to do with him.
By 1913 he could no longer sign his name, but could only make his mark. (An “X” was likely). In the succeeding few years his health deteriorated seriously and he needed constant attention. He was classified as an “army invalid”6 and was, in his son’s words “mentally like a child.” He made his final residence at the Soldiers’ Home Hospital in Los Angeles, California in 1923.
In a finale to his scandalous life story, letters written by Lloyd H. Wilson from California in 1929 and 1937 provide some details. Lloyd, a son of Milton and Caroline, introduced himself to Jen and Kate, telling of his father’s eleven additional children by two mothers. He related that he had learned only in a recent few years the surprising story of his father’s Iowa family and his true given name.
Although Mr. Wilson stated his hope to come to Afton to meet his father’s other children, it is not known that he did. In closing a 1927 letter, he remarked “Your father was one of the finest and best men that ever lived, and had the best care in his old age.”
Milton’s Missouri children knew a different parent than did his Iowa children. We can hope that the rest of Lloyd’s family shared the praise of their father, but must also sympathize with our great-grandmother Margaret and her family in their dismay at his abandonment of his wife and four children.
The passing of Margaret, by then a widow, happened shortly before that of Milton. She died in May 1926, while he died in July at nearly 91 years of age.
Sources
1. Enlistment, wartime action and discharge of Union County soldiers are reported in Centennial Sketches, Map and Directory of Union County, Iowa, C. J. Colby, publisher, Creston, Iowa, 1876, Ch. III.
2. Union County Recorder, Book E, p. 82
3. Union County Recorder, Book H, p. 137
4. Union County Recorder, Book G, p. 423
5. Related by both Frank and Carl Fluckey, as told to them by their mother Kate.
6. This was the heading of his pension card, dated 1912.
©2022 Dennis Kingery
Published by Dallas Genealogical Society with the author’s permission
