Men (and women?) of the Cleveland Light Artillery

chubachus

First Sergeant
Joined
Nov 27, 2014
Location
Virginia
cleveland light artillery.jpg


This image has intrigued me for a while. There looks to be at least three women in uniform. Possibly wives?

Source.
 
I don't seem to be able to follow your link, at least at the moment. Any information as to the date of the photo? The "Cleveland Light Artillery" predated the war by a number of years, so it's not automatically a wartime photo.
 
I don't seem to be able to follow your link, at least at the moment. Any information as to the date of the photo? The "Cleveland Light Artillery" predated the war by a number of years, so it's not automatically a wartime photo.

Hmm, it works for me. The book it was published in, "Behind Bayonets: The Civil War in Northern Ohio," says it was taken during the Civil War.
 
An old thread for sure so apologies is I am grave digging but this is definitely a wartime photo, the background is probably Camp Chase in Columbus, or Camp Putnam the boys set up over Marietta OH, and given that there are other pictures of the battery with that Camp in the background I highly suspect the latter. This would be in 1861 during the WV campaign. According to the WRHS the woman with the Sabre is Kate Howe who was the wife of Lt George Howe who is the man standing on the opposite side of the wheel. The women were very supportive during this time period, they made life in camp easier for the men and made red flannel powder bags for the cannon allowing the battery to do live fire practice.
 
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I had wondered about this picture, too. A quick glance at Reid's, Ohio in the War shows that 1LT George Howe was mustered in on 9 September 1861 and was mustered out at the end of the war. Howe served as the regimental quarter master. What's interesting is that his date of rank indicates that the photo was taken at Camp Dennison and not Camp Putnam. By this time, the CLA no longer existed as a militia organiztion; it was a true regiment.
 
Women's Temperance League.:D
 
I've never seen anything like this, thank you, and for filling in their information- crazy good stuff! Read a lot on women being patriotic, as war commenced, with vivandiere, daughters of the regiment- not much on wives who followed their husbands to camps. Talk about the proverbial 1,000 words.
 
Any thoughts on the short, or very young, man to the right of the group? He appears to be wearing a faded forage cap and, to me, it looks like a shoulder strap for a cartridge box.
 
Correct me if I’m wrong, but that’s an M1841 six-pounder they are posing with? I’ve been trying to track what guns the Cleveland Light Artillery had through the years... allegedly they had 12 lbers at one point in the 1840s when they expanded to four sections... though they also claim to have been practicing flying artillery tactics, which because this was pre-Napoleon sounds like it would have involved an awful lot of horse, which makes me skeptical of that claim. Perhaps those guns had already worn out and been discarded by the beginning of the war. Six pounders would make sense for a militia battery since it seems to have been a kind of de facto standard for state units to use six pounder guns.
 
An old thread for sure so apologies is I am grave digging but this is definitely a wartime photo, the background is probably Camp Chase in Columbus, or Camp Putnam the boys set up over Marietta OH, and given that there are other pictures of the battery with that Camp in the background I highly suspect the latter. This would be in 1861 during the WV campaign. According to the WRHS the woman with the Sabre is Kate Howe who was the wife of Lt George Howe who is the man standing on the opposite side of the wheel. The women were very supportive during this time period, they made life in camp easier for the men and made red flannel powder bags for the cannon allowing the battery to do live fire practice.

When you state "the man standing on the opposite side of the wheel", do you mean the man second from right in front of the white horse? I'm especially interested, since I've just acquired the Military Order of the Loyal Legion (MOLLUS) membership medal of Lt. Howe.
 
I tried linking this photo to the FB tintype, but basically every one of my posts with links in it on FB is automatically marked as spam and deleted. Would be great if someone posts this thread there for me.
 
Any thoughts on the short, or very young, man to the right of the group? He appears to be wearing a faded forage cap and, to me, it looks like a shoulder strap for a cartridge box.

I can't be sure about the forage cap... faded, pre/early war militia pattern perhaps... but the 'shoulder strap' is probably that of a powder bag or shot bag to transfer explosive material from the limber or ammunition chest to the gun itself. These bags were made of thick, pliable leather, designed in hopes of shielding explosives from an errant spark.
 
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