Eleazer H. Ripley

From Windham, he enlisted on 25 April 1861 and mustered as a Private in Rifle Company D, 3rd Connecticut Infantry on 11 May. He mustered out at the end of their term of service on 12 August.

He enlisted again, as a Private on 28 August 1861, but was appointed First Sergeant the same day and mustered in Company D, 8th Connecticut Infantry on 21 September. He was commissioned First Lieutenant of Company C on 2 March 1862 and promoted to Captain on 15 August.

He was wounded in the left arm in action at Antietam on 17 September 1862 and his arm was amputated the same day by Surgeon Storrs.

He was treated at the Crystal Spring/Locust Spring field hospital on the Geeting farm near Keedysville into at least October 1862:

I saw Capt. Ripley, of Windham, of whom you speak in your last number, in his temporary hospital, on the field of Antietam. He was lying on the straw-littered floor of a barn, by the side of Lieut. Mayne [Main], of Brooklyn, your county, and among as many more of our wounded soldiers, mostly of the rank and file, as the floor could hold. On the outside, again, wherever in the barn-yard, stacks of straw, sheds, trees, or fences, could afford shade and obstacles to the unadvised footsteps of man and beast, there our wounded lay. Our two officers lay quietly abiding their fate, taking their soldier's fortune with soldierly fortitude.

He was discharged from the VRC in late 1868, by which time he and his company were working in support of the Freedman's Bureau in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia.

He was a clerk in the Pension Office in the US Department of the Interior in Washington, DC from 1869 to at least 1913, a span of more than 40 years. In 1880 he lived in Falls Church, VA but he had moved into the city of Washington by 1900.

His service from the Record1 and the Records of the Field Offices for the State of Virginia, Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands (BRFAL), 1865–1872, Library of Virginia. Amputation detail from the MSHWR.2 The quote above from the Willimantic Journal of 10 October 1862, shared in a post about Ripley on his Civil War blog by John Banks. Personal details from family genealogists, the US Census of 1880-1910, and the Official Register of the United States (1870, 1913). His gravesite is on Findagrave. His picture here from a post-Antietam photograph sold (along with his sword) by the Horse Soldier, Gettysburg.

He married Mary Potter Coe (1834-1929) and they had a daughter Emma (1876-1959).

See more about Black Borderlanders experience in the Shenandoah Valley 1865-1870 from Donna Camille Dodenhoff's 2016 doctoral dissertation, online from William & Mary; referencing correspondence from Captain Ripley.

11/13/1834; Windham, CT

04/11/1915; Washington, DC; burial in Arlington National Cemetery, Arlington, VA