REMEMBERING
THE CIVIL WAR
William
White was a 26-year-old tanner and currier working at the old Wallin Tannery, situated
about where the fifth green is at Clearbrook Golf Club today, when he enlisted August
14, 1862, as
a corporal in Co. I, 5th
Michigan Cavalry. He was born in Cape
Breton, Nova
Scotia, Canada, but
left home at nine years of age to work in a coal mine, coming to Saugatuck in 1855. He was
taken prisoner at Richmond, Virginia, on March
1, 1864,
and was a prisoner at Libby and Andersonville
prisons before being exchanged and rejoining his company on December
28, 1864.
In
the last push in April, 1865, White “won laurels for bravery” and was still on
the firing line when the white flag went up at Appomattox. He
was commissioned a second lieutenant of Co. L, on April
14, 1865.
According to a 1907 history “with the exception of the year he was held as a
prisoner, he took part in all the battles and skirmishes of his regiment and during his
service was never ill or wounded and never missed a meal”. White was mustered out at Fort
Leavenworth, Kansas, on June
23, 1865.
After
the war he took up farming near Peach Belt in Ganges Township but
after their daughters were grown, he and his wife, the former Caroline Martin of New
Richmond, traded the farm for a house in Douglas,
known as Kalamont, that had been built about the time of the Civil War by Thomas Gray, a Douglas
merchant. Over the piano in the parlor, he hung a large engraving of Andersonville Prison,
in remembrance of the 11 months he had spent there.
By Kit Lane
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