The exact page text, read by your browser's voice.
"Mother George" — Fort Wayne's Civil War nurse
On the record
Elizabeth Hamilton was born in Bridport, Vermont, on October 20, 1808, married Woodbridge C. George, and settled in Fort Wayne before 1850, living on Berry Street. Her son-in-law, Colonel Sion S. Bass, organizer and first commander of the 30th Indiana Volunteers, was killed at Shiloh in 1862. The following January, a fifty-four-year-old widow, George volunteered with the Indiana Sanitary Commission, a forerunner of the Army Nurse Corps, and left Fort Wayne in February 1863. She nursed at Memphis, Corinth, and Pulaski, hauled wagonloads of supplies from Indiana to the front, and marched with Sherman's army through the Atlanta campaign to Jonesborough; the soldiers who knew her care called her "Mother George." Her last post was Wilmington, North Carolina, nursing thousands of Union prisoners newly freed from Salisbury Prison; there she contracted typhoid and died on May 9, 1865, a month after Appomattox. Her body was brought home and buried at Lindenwood Cemetery with full military honors, and the Indiana Sanitary Commission and the Fort Wayne Ladies Aid Society raised a monument to her there.
Find them on this page
- § 06 — people of the record · famous-people supplement
Sources: Indiana Historical Bureau (Indiana History Blog); Allen County Public Library, Mother George: Fort Wayne's Angel of Mercy (1964); Indiana Commission for Women (biography).