Aftermath
The announcement of Confederate General Robert E. Lee’s surrender in the Wooster Republican on April 13, 1865.
Thomas Eckert, Wooster's telegraph operator, continued to work in the telegraph industry after the war, eventually serving as president of Western Union.
Colonel Aquila Wiley, of the 41st Ohio Volunteer Infantry. He lost his leg leading a charge during the Battle of Missionary Ridge, becoming a visible reminder of the horrors of the war.
Jacob Frick’s monument to the veterans of the Civil War stands in Wooster’s public square.
After the war, soldiers from the Union army formed the Grand Army of the Republic, a fraternal organization for veterans of the Union army. Wooster members of the G.A.R. pledge allegiance next to the Frick monument in this 1912 photograph.
Veterans of the 120th Ohio reunite and catch up on old times at the home of Joseph P. Van Nest in Wooster.
As the Civil War drew to a close in the spring of 1865, soldiers from Wooster and Wayne County still in service began to return home. Residents of the city celebrated the surrender of Lee and the fall of the Confederacy. However, just five days after Lee’s surrender, John Wilkes Booth assassinated President Lincoln. Communities across the nation entered into a state of shock and mourning and Wooster was no exception. When news reached the city, businesses closed, memorial services were held, and some Wooster residents even traveled to Cleveland to see Lincoln’s body as his funeral train passed by on its way to Illinois.1
As for those volunteers mustered out of service in 1865, they returned home with distinction to a grateful city and nation that regarded them as heroes. Several people linked to Wooster went on to serve in positions of importance after the war. Aquila Wiley, Wooster native and colonel of the 41st Ohio Volunteer Infantry, received a Democratic nomination for Congress but was defeated by his opponent, future president William McKinley. Thomas Eckert, who worked in Wooster as the city’s telegraph operator during the 1850s, was made chief telegraph operator of the War Department in Washington during the war. He later served as the president of the Western Union telegraph company.2
However, the darker aspects of the war continued to haunt those connected to the conflict. Families had lost loved ones and those soldiers who returned were physically and emotionally weakened from battles, disease, and time spent in Confederate prison camps. William Given, who resigned as a Wayne County judge to lead the 102nd Ohio Volunteer Infantry, served for the entirety of the war and died only a year after returning to Wooster, at the age of 47.3 Others in the community acted as visible reminders of the brutality of the conflict. John F. Barrett was the first soldier from Wayne County to be shot during the war and suffered from his wound until his death in 1913. Colonel Aquila Wiley had lost a leg while leading a charge at the Battle of Missionary Ridge.4
In 1892, Jacob Frick, the President of the Wayne County National Bank of Wooster, funded the construction of a memorial in Wooster’s public square to honor the soldiers from Wayne County who had fought in the Civil War. As Wayne County historian Ben Douglass asserts in his 1878 history, “Wayne County has reason to be proud of its record in the Civil War. Her soldiers participated in every great battle, and her dead lie in every Southern State.”5
The experiences and hardships of people such as William Given, the Wooster victims of the Sultana disaster, and the Stibbs family gave Wooster a very personal connection to the nationwide struggle that was the American Civil War.
1 Wooster Ohio Sesquicentennial Celebration (Wooster: Wooster Sesquicentennial Committee, 1958), 37.
2 Paul Locher, “When Wayne was a Whippersnapper: Gen. Aquila Wiley,” October 31, 2012; “Gen. Thomas T. Eckert Dead,” The New York Times, October 21, 1910.
3 Ben Douglass, History of Wayne County, Ohio (Indianapolis: Robert Douglass, 1878), 432-33.
4 Edward Harry Hauenstein, A History of Wayne County in the World Wars and in the Wars of the Past (Wooster: Wayne County History Co., 1919), 50, 55.
5 Douglass, History of Wayne County, Ohio, 759.