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Medal of Honor recipient; the general who pursued Geronimo
On the record
Henry Ware Lawton was born in Maumee, Ohio, on March 17, 1843; his family moved to Fort Wayne that same year, for work in the mills, and Fort Wayne is where he was raised and educated, at the city's Methodist Episcopal College. He enlisted from Fort Wayne in April 1861, served in the 9th and then the 30th Indiana infantry, and won the Medal of Honor for his part in the fighting before Atlanta on August 3, 1864. After the war he stayed in the regular army; in 1886 he led the grueling pursuit through Mexico that brought about Geronimo's surrender. A major general of volunteers in the Spanish-American War, he was commanding in the Philippines when he was killed at San Mateo on December 19, 1899 — the only American general officer killed in the Philippine–American War. Lawton, Oklahoma, founded in 1901 outside Fort Sill, is named for him. Fort Wayne renamed Northside Park as Lawton Park in 1900 and raised his statue in Lakeside Park in 1921; he is buried at Arlington.
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- § 06 — people of the record · famous-people supplement
Sources: California Center for Military History (biography); Redlands Area Historical Society (Lawton commemoration history).