Ridge Historical Society
Part IV for Memorial Day – The Civil War and the Ridge
Carol Flynn, RHS Communications
Women joined the war effort, also. At least three U.S. Army Nurses who served during the Civil War have been identified from Blue Island.
Thousands of women served as nurses during the Civil War, first as volunteers, and then as paid members of a nurse corps established through the efforts of Clara Barton in 1861. Dorothea Dix organized nursing efforts in the Washington, D. C., area, and Mary Ann Bickerdyke did likewise at the military camps in Cairo, Illinois.
Nursing as a profession was in its infancy, and there were no nursing education programs. At first women were considered too delicate to cope with the demands of caring for the sick and wounded, but they soon proved themselves through their determination, hard work and sacrifice. Women nurses were paid $0.40 per day. Male nurses in the same situations were paid over $200 per month.
Nurses came from many sources, including wives who had accompanied their soldier husbands to camps, women who lived by the camps, and members of religious institutions and relief organizations.
Mt. Greenwood Cemetery identified the grave of one Civil War woman veteran buried there, Catherine Near, U. S. Army Nurse. Her maiden name was Catherine Fay and she was known as Kate.
The Fay family came to Blue Island in the early 1850s. Kate was living with her mother and a son from a first marriage, with a sister and brother in town, when the war broke out. The exact sequence of events that led Kate to become an Army nurse are not yet documented, but records show that she married John H. Near, a soldier from Blue Island, in December of 1861 in Alexander County, which includes Cairo as the county seat. Cairo, at the southern tip of the state on the Mississippi River, was the site for many Union camps, a point from which the soldiers embarked for campaigns in the South.
So far there is no documentation of Kate Near’s experiences as a nurse. The 1870 U. S. Census reports John and Kate Near and her son living in Grand Tower, Illinois, in the far southern part of the state in Jackson County. It appears the marriage later broke up, with Kate and her son returning to Blue Island, and John Near relocating to Missouri.
Army records show that Kate received her own pension from the Army. She died in 1908 at the age of 73. The cause of death was listed as accidental gas poisoning, assumedly from a gas leak.
Kate’s brother, Jerome Fay, bought property for farming at the junction of the Calumet River and Stony Creek, which became known as Fay’s Point. Jerome married John Near’s sister, Lydia. So a Fay brother and sister married a Near brother and sister.
At the entrance to Memorial Park on 127th Street in Blue Island is a display of old tombstones dating back to the days when the park was the Blue Island Cemetery. One of the stones belonged to Clarissa F. McClintock, U. S. Army Nurse.
The McClintock family came to the Ridge in 1850 and was among the “intelligentsia” of early Blue Island. Clarissa’s mother, Laura (Mrs. Thomas), and her sister, Marion, ran a private school in their home on Vermont St. Her father Thomas allowed his large collection of books to be borrowed by the townspeople, starting the first Blue Island “library.” McClintock's occupation was as a county surveyor.
Both Clarissa and her older sister Marion were listed as employed in 1863 at Jefferson Barracks, Missouri, as commissioned nurses. As with Kate Near, no documentation of their experiences have been uncovered yet.
Clarissa was born in 1842 and died young, in March 1867, “after two years’ illness.” It is possible she contracted a lingering illness during the war. She was buried in the Blue Island Cemetery. That cemetery was closed and turned into a park. Most, but not all, of the graves were moved to other cemeteries. Her old gravestone is still in Blue Island but the location of the McClintock family graves hasn’t been looked into yet by RHS.
Marion was born in 1835 and died in 1900. She taught German for many years in the Chicago Public Schools. Marion is buried in Rosehill Cemetery.
The McClintock sisters and Kate Near are listed in the Army pension records. They are also listed in the Illinois Roll of Honor, compiled in 1929 to identify the burial places of those who served in any of the wars up to that time and were buried in Illinois. The list was started to aid in honoring deceased veterans on Decoration (Memorial) Day.
This concludes our posts – for now – about some of the Ridge residents who served in the U.S. Civil War. Their sacrifices to preserve the Union and the U.S. Constitution should be remembered.