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1862 – 1865
The 21st Battery, Indiana Light Artillery, was made up principally from St. Joseph and La Porte counties: Organized and mustered at Indianapolis on 9 September 1862 under Captain William W. Andrew, the battery went to Kentucky against Kirby Smith, fought at Carthage, Tennessee, at Hoover's Gap, at Chickamauga, and in the storming of Mission Ridge on 25 November 1863; it was engaged with Forrest at Columbia, Tennessee, on 1 October 1864, and under fire before Nashville on 15–16 December 1864, mustering out at Indianapolis on 21 June 1865. The battery entered service with 141 men and 5 officers and received 69 recruits. Its losses, as Chapman compiles them, were 2 killed in action, 1 died of wounds, 2 died from injuries by explosion of ammunition, and 21 died of disease; the St. Joseph County loss in the battery was 11, who died from wounds or disease. Captain Andrew was discharged for disability from wounds on 17 September 1864 and Lieutenant Abram P. Andrew succeeded him. The battery's Lieutenant Alfred B. Miller wrote the verses Chapman prints to close the battery's record — "Remember Buena Vista," built on the dying cry of a 10th Indiana captain in the Mexican War — the county's artillery carrying its memory in a poem written by one of its own lieutenants.
Sources:
- Chapman, History of St. Joseph County (1880), ch. VII — the battery's organization, battle line, strength and losses, the county's eleven, Andrew's discharge and succession, and Miller's poem as printed there.