Elbert Henry Sawyer

From Fenton, he enlisted and mustered into Company G, Eighth Infantry on 13 August 1862 at Fenton, for 3 years, at age 18.

He was wounded in the right hand in action at Antietam on 17 September 1862.

Re-enlisted on December 29, 1863. Mustered on December 30, 1863. Corporal. Wounded in action on May 12, 1864 at Spotsylvania. Discharged for disability at Detroit, Michigan on February 4, 1865.

He attended Kalamazoo College, La Grange College (MO) Theological Seminary (grad. 1870), and the theology school at the University of Chicago. He was a professor at La Grange (1875-), and president of Canon City College, CO (c. 1887). He was President of the Baptist Convention of Colorado, a long-time minister in St. Louis, MO, and in 1899 president of the Baptist minister's conference in St. Louis. He retired from his pastorate in St Louis to a farm near Chickasha, OK some time before 1919. In 1944, at age 101, he was honorary associate pastor of the Chickasha First Baptist.

He published a Historical Chart (1879) [full] and was the author of at least 3 books, The Biography of Jesus (1927), a small book about the Fredericksburg National Military Park (1932), and Science of Religion (1936). He was active in the Missouri Milita - eventually appointed Colonel and the State's Adjutant General - and in the GAR.

Basic information from State of Michigan1. Further details from a sketch on him in T.W. Herringshaw's Encyclopedia of American Biography of the Nineteenth Century (1906) and from family genealogists. Thanks to Steve Maczuga for publishing the 8th Michigan information in his excellent database.

12/18/1843; Millford, MI

after 1943