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April 1861 – September 1865
Twice raised in one year: St. Joseph County put a company into the 9th Indiana Infantry twice in 1861. The first went out with the three-months regiment — organized at Indianapolis in April 1861 under Colonel Robert H. Milroy, the first Indiana regiment to leave the state, which fought its brief western Virginia campaign at Philippi, Laurel Hill, and Carrick's Ford and came home in July. When the regiment reorganized for three years, Chapman writes, "a company was formed in this county principally from among those who had seen service," and he prints its roster entire. Its captain was James Houghton; its first lieutenant Isaac M. Pettit; its second lieutenant William Merrifield; its orderly sergeant James Nutt; its sergeants Seth B. Parks, Frank W. Childs, Lewis A. Holliday, and William H. Criswell; and among its corporals and privates stand names that recur through this whole record — Jesse Miller, Solomon Michael, Selah Pickett, Charles O. Pressey, Joseph Rogers, Harrison Shearer, Levi P. Snure, Daniel B. Ungry, and the recruits Frank M. Andrews, Henry Baugh, and Benjamin Bonney.
The letter of the company: Chapman prints the roster without a company letter. The letter is settled from the regiment's own ground: the burial records of Shiloh National Cemetery carry "Houghton, James — Captain — I" and "Miller, Jesse — Corporal — I," and the regimental literature records that James Nutt of Company I began as a first sergeant and ended as a captain of the three-year regiment — the same James Nutt whom Howard's reprinting of the county roster names as this company's orderly sergeant, the first sergeant's other title. The county company of the three-years 9th Indiana was Company I.
Its war: The regiment mustered into United States service at La Porte on September 5, 1861, wintered at Cheat Mountain, and reached the Tennessee River in time for the second day at Shiloh, where the National Park Service's account of the regiment's own battlefield monument gives its loss as one officer and sixteen men killed and seven officers and one hundred forty-six men wounded. The officer was this company's captain: James Houghton was killed on April 7, 1862, and Jesse Miller, his corporal, fell the same day. The regiment fought on through Perryville, Stone River, Chickamauga — where Lieutenant William H. Criswell, risen from this company's sergeants, was killed on September 19, 1863 — Lookout Mountain and Missionary Ridge, where William P. Varney of the county's men was killed on November 25, 1863, and the Atlanta campaign, and mustered out on September 28, 1865. Dyer's accounting gives the 9th Indiana 353 dead in all: eleven officers and one hundred twenty enlisted men killed or mortally wounded, and two officers and two hundred twenty enlisted men dead of disease.
Whose company it was: The company was the county's, raised "in this county" in Chapman's words, and the rolls Chapman and Howard print do not divide its men by town. Its Mishawaka weight is nonetheless written across the later record: the city's Grand Army post took Houghton's name, and sixteen of the fifty names on the city's Civil War memorial plaque of 2024 stand in this company's printed roster, more than from any other single company the county histories print. The town-level division of the roster itself rests in the adjutant general's printed rolls, which give each man's residence; that division is named among this section's settling sources, and the company is printed here as what the record proves — the county company a Mishawaka captain commanded and Mishawaka men filled.
Sources:
- Charles C. Chapman & Co., History of St. Joseph County, Indiana (1880), ch. VII, the 9th Infantry rosters and narrative, pp. 414–417, and the Roll of Honor, pp. 444–448.
- Timothy E. Howard, A History of St. Joseph County, Indiana (1907), vol. 2, the 9th's roster reprinted and the Grand Army section.
- Shiloh National Cemetery burial records, as carried in the 9th Indiana's regimental summaries; National Park Service, Shiloh monument detail for the 9th Indiana Infantry (casualties of April 7, 1862).
- Frederick H. Dyer, A Compendium of the War of the Rebellion (1908), 9th Regiment Indiana Infantry (3 years), regimental loss.