Diary of Orrin Brown, Kalamazoo, Michigan
Sunday–Oct. 9th
Clear and pleasant and bids fair to be a warm day, went to the Burdick House and Norman and I with some of the other boys went up to the Unighted Brethren Church and heard a good sermon. Norman and I went and took a walk around town then went up to Camp Hooker about 1&1/4 miles from town went back to barracks in time for supper, wrote a letter to Ellen this evening. Went to bed again on my pine board.
The Kalamazoo Valley Museum has posted letters of several other Michigan soldiers from the Civil War. In the original material I have read over the years, it seems soldiers saved the more mundane details for journals and diaries, although in every war there is an imperative to censor mail. Different sources give different perspectives and these are essential primary references.
The American Civil War had a more profound social, political and economic impact than almost any other event in American history. By the end of the war, 3,221 men from Kalamazoo County had served, and 365 had died, including 58 killed in action, 48 from wounds, 25 as prisoners of war, 22 missing in action and 212 from disease. While Orrin Brown lived in Berrien County, to the west closer to Lake Michigan, men across the entire region of Southwest Michigan served and died in the War between the States. I believe the “Ellen” to whom Orrin was writing a letter may be his sister-in-law Ellen Kennedy Brown (1837-1901), who was married to Orrin’s brother Norman E. Brown (1831-1908).
Read more:
- Fierce Patriot: The Tangled Lives of William Tecumseh Sherman by Robert L. O’Connell (Random House, 2014)
- Michigan and the Civil War: A Great and Bloody Sacrifice (Civil War Series) by Jak Dempsey (The History Press, 2011)
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