- Joined
- Mar 20, 2010
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Drawing of the USS Owasco, the gunboat that Quartermaster Edward Farrell served on in 1862 when he won his Medal of Honor.
Civil War hero found in unmarked grave in Portage
By Mike Sever | staff writer Published:April 21, 2013 4:00AM
For more than a century, a
Civil War veteran -- a Medal of Honor recipient -- who died in Palmyra, Ohio, lay in an unmarked, pauper's grave in Edinburg, Ohio, until a local genealogist pulled together the threads of a story of a missing hero.
That veteran will be honored at noon May 18, Armed Forces Day, by local officials and veterans with a new granite grave marker.
The story started in early 2011 when the Portage County, Ohio, Historical Society got an email from the Medal of Honor Historical Society asking about the burial site of Edward Farrell, a quartermaster in the Union Navy.
Jackie Woodring took on the job of finding the missing veteran.
By the end of 2011, she said, "I finally, finally solved it." She had Farrell's military records, but nothing that said where he had been buried.
"He wasn't listed anywhere" in any of the directories of county cemeteries, she said. Once the information was deemed sufficient to apply for the marker, it was submitted to a historian at the National Cemetery Administration of the Veterans Administration. The VA took months to approve the request. The military supplies free grave markers when requested by next of kin.
Edinburg Township trustees agreed to pay the nearly $500 for the official military marker when Woodring couldn't turn up any direct descendents.
The threads came together when Woodring found an "Edward Ferrell" as No. 14 on a handwritten list of civil war soldiers in Edinburg. The list was made by Orral Frank of Ravenna and was headed "Found this list given me by someone in a notebook I keep." Woodring found it filed away at the county historical society which Miss Frank had helped organize years ago.
Woodring checked with Chris Diehl, sexton for the Edinburg Township Cemetery, who found an "Edward Fauel" buried in a five-grave lot set aside for "Infirmary Directees" or indigents.
Born in 1833 in Saratoga, N.Y., Farrell was awarded the Medal of Honor for his actions on April 24, 1862 during the attacks on Forts Jackson and St. Phillip, two Confederate forts protecting New Orleans. He was aboard the USS Owasco, a 691-ton steam gunboat that was part of a flotilla under David Farragut that made a historic dash past the Confederate heavy guns and smashed the Confederate flotilla guarding New Orleans. The action led to the fall of New Orleans the next day.
Farrell was stationed at the masthead of the two-masted schooner and observed and reported the effect of the fire from the ships' guns "in such a manner as to make his intelligence, coolness and capacity conspicuous," according to his Medal of Honor citation. He received the medal a year after the action.
Woodring's search turned up Farrell's military records which show he had six known enlistments in the Navy, not all continuous. He first joined on July 6, 1855 in New York City and served aboard the USS North Carolina and later the USS Saratoga before being discharged in January 1858. He enlisted again just three months later and was back aboard the North Carolina, then several other ships including the USS Ohio.
A year after his medal-winning action, Farrell was diagnosed with "pulmonary phthisis" (a wasting away or tuberculosis) and discharged. Two years later, he re-enlisted, was hospitalized and discharged. Beset with health problems, Farrell re-enlisted, was hospitalized and discharged a few more times until his final hospitalization in 1871. In April 1879 he is listed as living in Wayne County.
It is not known how Farrell came to live in Portage County in the final years of his life. Woodring found military records that show he married Nancy Farrell in 1882 in Sharon, Pa., just over the Ohio line. She already had eight grown children from a previous marriage. The couple lived in Hubbard for two years. In 1890, the Veteran Schedule has him living in Deerfield.
Ill health dogged Farrell for most of his life. In 1886 he filed an affidavit seeking a veteran's pension due to being an invalid. Farrell said he "hasn't been able to perform more half a day's manual labor some of the time even that, being under the care of a physician."
The 1900 census, taken just two years before his death, showed he lived in Edinburg with his wife, Nancy. Both were 69 years of age and had been married for 14 years. Farrell's occupation was listed as a "moulder," indicating he made molds for bricks or iron casting. Sometime between the census and his death on March 23, 1902, Farrell and his wife moved to Diamond in Palmyra.
In February 1902, just a month before his death, Farrell filed a surgeon's certificate, hoping for an increase of his $30 monthly pension. The doctor listed Farrell as being 5 feet, 10 inches tall and weighing only 90 pounds, He had tuberculosis in both lungs and chronic rheumatism, making him totally unable to support himself and his wife.
Woodring said Farrell's passing was barely noticed. A small obituary appeared in the Portage County Democrat on March 27, 1902, noting that "Mr. Ferral" had died the previous Sunday and that he was "a great sufferer for years" and that he and his wife were dependent on the care of neighbors and friends. Being in extremely poor health herself, Mrs. Farrell's children took her back to Pennsylvania the day her husband died. She died barely a week later, Woodring said.
Farrell is the fourth known Civil War Medal of Honor recipient with ties to Portage County. Newton Hall of Brimfield and John H. Ricksecker were honored for their actions in the Battle of Franklin. Orion Howe, a 14-year-old drummer boy, was honored for valor at the Battle of Vicksburg. Hall is buried in Standing Rock Cemtery in Kent, with a Medal of Honor marker. Ricksecker and Howe are not buried in Portage County. http://www.recordpub.com/news local/2013/04/21/civil-war-hero-found-in-unmarked-grave-in-portage
Bringing the