The 8th Ohio Volunteer Infantry

By Dennis Keating
The Cleveland Civil War Roundtable
Copyright © 2012, All Rights Reserved

During the 2009 Cleveland Civil War Roundtable field trip to Gettysburg, our group laid a wreath at the monument honoring the 8th Ohio Volunteer Infantry (OVI). This Ohio regiment, known as “The Fighting Fools,” is perhaps best known for its role in helping to repel the Pickett-Pettigrew charge on July 3, 1863. The 8th OVI was part of the “Gibraltar” brigade of Alexander Hays’s division, in Winfield Hancock’s II Corps of the Army of the Potomac.

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Peter Diemer & Curtis Phillips: The Last Civil War Veterans From Cuyahoga County

By Paul Siedel
The Cleveland Civil War Roundtable
Copyright © 2016, All Rights Reserved

Not too long ago while visiting the Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Monument in downtown Cleveland, Ohio I overheard a docent telling someone that the last Civil War veteran from Cuyahoga County died in 1943. His name was Peter Diemer.

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A Monument to Service: The Cuyahoga County Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Monument

By Tim Daley and Richard T. Prasse
The Cleveland Civil War Roundtable
Copyright © 2015, All Rights Reserved

The Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Monument commemorates in stone, bronze and glass the service of those enlisted and appointed from Cuyahoga County during the Civil War. Their names are captured in marble inside the Monument’s Memorial Tablet Room, etched alongside those with whom they served during the national struggle. The story of the Monument’s creation was also a struggle. The idea to erect a monument was first proposed by William Gleason in October 1879 to the Soldiers and Sailors Society in Cleveland. Gleason with two others were charged to test the idea the following week at a reunion of Union Veterans. The project was approved with a committee appointed to seek funding support from the State of Ohio. Their advocacy resulted in eight different legislative acts by 1894 in support of the construction of the Monument.

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Base Ball on Johnson’s Island

By William F.B. Vodrey
The Cleveland Civil War Roundtable
Copyright © 2014, All Rights Reserved

On August 27, 1864, Confederate prisoners played a base ball (as it used to be spelled) game on Johnson’s Island near Sandusky, Ohio, on the grounds of the U.S. Army prison camp there. The Confederate and the Southern base ball clubs took to the field, and when all was said and done, the Southern team won by a score of 19-11.

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“Beyond the Battlefield”: An Ohio History Connection Symposium

By William F.B. Vodrey
The Cleveland Civil War Roundtable
Copyright © 2014, All Rights Reserved

The Ohio History Connection (the newly rebranded Ohio Historical Society) on November 8 hosted a symposium on Ohio’s home front during the Civil War. Nine historians, professional and amateur, explored various topics in three panel discussions.

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U.S. Grant Boyhood Home Rededicated

By William F.B. Vodrey
The Cleveland Civil War Roundtable
Copyright © 2013, All Rights Reserved

On April 6, Mel Maurer, Chris Fortunato, and I went to Georgetown, Ohio to attend the ceremonial rededication of U.S. Grant’s boyhood home. Georgetown is just east of Cincinnati, about four and a half hours’ drive from Cleveland.

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Ulysses S. Grant in Georgetown, Ohio – The Indispensable Man’s Boyhood Home

By Daniel J. Ursu
The Cleveland Civil War Roundtable
Copyright © 2017, All Rights Reserved

If you believe, as I and many others do, that the Civil War would not have been won by the North but for U.S. Grant, then a visit to his boyhood home in our own State of Ohio at Georgetown, about ten miles north of the Ohio River and 40 miles east of Cincinnati, will be inspiring, informative and worthwhile.

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Hickenlooper’s Ohio Artillery Anchors the Hornet’s Nest at Shiloh

By Daniel J. Ursu
The Cleveland Civil War Roundtable
Copyright © 2017, All Rights Reserved

Not only did the abolitionist John Brown, the “Meteor of the Civil War” as proffered by poet Walt Whitman, live part of his life in the northeastern Ohio Village of Hudson, but did another military leader of the Civil War actually hail from Hudson – that being Andrew Hickenlooper, Captain of the 5th Independent Battery Ohio Light Artillery.

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Andrew Johnson: A Tough Man for Tough Times

By Dick Crews
The Cleveland Civil War Roundtable
Copyright © 2008, All Rights Reserved

Editor’s note: This article was originally published in The Charger in the winter of 2001.


“The History of mankind,” said the old Scotsman Thomas Carlyle, “is a history of its great men; to find out these, clean the dirt from them, and place them on their proper pedestal is the true function of a historian.”

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Conscripts in the Civil War

By Dick Crews
The Cleveland Civil War Roundtable
Copyright © 2011, All Rights Reserved

Conscript is not a word frequently used in discussing soldiers in the Civil War. In his book They Went into the Fight Cheering: Confederate Conscription in North Carolina, Walter Hilderman III, a man of the South, said the following: “Naturally, I assumed that my great, great Grandfather had eagerly volunteered for the Confederate army when the first shots were fired. Such was not the case. Through his letters, I found that he and most of his army companions were known as con-scripts. When I first came across the word, I had to look it up in the dictionary. The words eager and volunteer were not part of the definition.”

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