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I recently acquired an album which contained an interesting carte de visite image of a Civil War ordnance sergeant, and so identified by the sergeant stripes with a star above. Ordnance sergeants, in rank, are just below a sergeant major and above a first sergeant. The reason for this is that each regiment had one ordnance sergeant while every company in a regiment had a first sergeant. And the sergeant major was also on a regiment level and was always the highest ranking enlisted man.
This particular image, while taken by Addis in Washington D. C. the album was otherwise entirely from Mauch Chunk, Pennsylvania. Now if you are not familiar with Mauch Chunk, that is not surprising as in 1953 the city fathers, in hopes of creating tourism, renamed the town Jim Thorpe after the famous Native American athlete.
This particular soldier was not identified so as is my wont, I launched a search on google hoping to find his identity. I eventually found the names of several ordnance sergeants with Pennsylvania units and continued researching these names.
One such person was name John Joseph Henderson. The son of a Methodist minister, Henderson was born in 1843 and was educated in the Meadville, Pennsylvania, public schools until 1858 (when he was 15) when he entered Allegheny College, and graduated with the class of 1862 (now he was 19).
Here the government records take over. On 20 August 1862 he enlisted in Company K of the 150th Pennsylvania Infantry a a private. Almost immediately, Company K was detached from the regiment and under one Captain Donald Derreckson assigned to guard President Abraham Lincoln at his summer home, "The Soldier's Home" as it was called. Lincoln spent from June to November in residence here, along with his family. Henderson served his entire military career at this post and was discharged as a private on 115 June 1865.
The reason Henderson showed up as an "ordnance sergeant" is that in his fraternity (Phi Gamma Delta) yearly newsletter Henderson, who was later in life a Republican office holder, wrote a couple of articles detailing his military career and made himself an ordnance sergeant and also testified that he had witnessed the assassination of the President. As for the latter, there is no way of knowing the truth of this. But he clearly never was an ordnance sergeant or any thing other than a private. In addition to which, apparently his fraternity brothers being poorly inform in military matters, the detached Company K had no ordnance and as a company no place on the roster for an ordnance sergeant. So apparently fabricating one's military record is not just a twenty-first century practice.
Oh yes, I have still to identify my ordnance sergeant.
