The Last Great Place
It’s Good to Be Here and Now
By Michael Capuzzo

Marilla Park was a spinster who lived with her parents in a Chemung County farmhouse as the Civil War raged. Like a rough country Jane Austen, Marilla kept a diary, but one of Pennsylvania hard times, not English country aristocracy. She stashed it away in the eaves of the farmhouse attic when she moved.

Joshua Ingalls was a private in Co. A, 149th Bucktail Brigade captained by A.J. Schofield of Wellsboro. After serving the Union cause for 33 months from Chancellorsville to Spotsylvania, he was shot through the lungs at North Anna River and lay on the field, waiting to die.

Though they probably never met, they were ordinary people caught in the stream of history, people with indomitable will, born survivors. The soldier and spinster remind us what the human spirit can endure, and that we’re rather lucky, with our war and our election, to be right here and now. Their stories are the type of treasures you can mine on Joyce Tice’s wonderful history site, www.joycetice.com.

Marilla wrote her diary on February 14, 1864: “Oh, what a warlike nation this has become. Another proclamation for 200 thousand more men to come to the slaughter ground.” Spring brought the death of a young cousin of measles or “congestion of the lungs,” and summer the passing of her sister Ada of typhoid fever. Her brother wanted to enlist in the war. “Others (are) leaving to avoid the draft,” she wrote, “many wishing they were in Canada.”

November was the presidential election, with Lincoln seeking reelection against his former top general, George B. McClellen. She wrote, “People seem to be in a terrible commotion. I will bear in silence and keep aloof from helping to make flags to take any part… there is a great struggle going on between the two political parties and bloodshed is expected at all events.”

On April 10, 1865, with Lincoln in the White House, “The greatest excitementprevails, people seem nearly crazy with joy. News of the surrender of the Rebel Gen. Lee and army as prisoners of war. Cannons are booming in every direction, but I do not approve of such demonstrations of joy over victories bought with such streams of blood.”

Five days later, her pen scratched this: “April 15. Sat. eve. This afternoon brought the startling news that the Pres. Abraham Lincoln is dead. He was shot in a theater and died this morning. Is a theater the place for the Pres. of the U. S. to go? Better to bind up the wounds of the poor wounded soldiers.”

Marilla developed cancer on her leg, and nursed a gravely ill father. Her account was grim, but she buried it in the attic, where bad dreams go, and went on to live into the next century, to 1909, to the ripe age of 82.

Ingalls was one of those wounded soldiers. It took six hours before a surgeon found him on the field of battle, and he exclaimed, “No use bothering with this fellow, he’s as good as dead now!” Ingalls roused up and whispered loud enough for the surgeon to hear “Dam you, I bet I live longer than you do!” So he did. Mr. Ingalls died at Covington, on November 28th 1929 in his 91st year.