Jacob and Martha Dieter
"The Government had called on young men to enlist... I can remember my mother crying and my father saying it was his duty to go."
Jacob Dieter from Olmsted County enlisted in 1862 and served in Company F of the Ninth Minnesota Regiment. His wife Martha and children accompanied him to Fort Ridgely for training and returned home when his unit was sent south to Kansas and Missouri. Below is a photograph of Jacob Dieter in his Civil War uniform:
In a letter from Independence, Missouri, Jacob wrote about an experience his unit had with about 25 Bushwhackers, the guerrilla fighters resisting Union forces in the area, after passing by several burnt buildings in the towns and countryside. He wrote:
"We seen about twenty five Bushwhackers they were on a knoll about a mile from us in a line of battle. Our Company deployed as skirmishers and advanced towards them and they left. They were on horseback so they soon got out of sight. That was the nearest we ever came to having a fight and there was not a gun fired but we kept a pretty strong guard out that night for we did not know but they might attack us after dark."
In June 1864, Dieter was reported missing after the Battle of Brice’s Cross Roads in northern Mississippi. He had been captured by the Confederate forces along with several other Olmsted County men. The group was transferred to Andersonville Prison, a Confederate prisoner-of-war camp in Georgia. On June 22, 1864, he wrote his family a letter from Andersonville Prison, the last one they ever received. While no one knows for sure what happened next, some believe he tried to escape by jumping off a prisoner transport train. He was recaptured and later died from starvation or illness in North Carolina’s Salisbury Prison.
MDL contains several letters sent to and from Jacob during his service in the Civil War. See below for a selection of the Dieter family letters from the Civil War, including one from Varnum Hadley reporting that Jacob was missing. Click or tap on the documents to read them and access their transcripts on MDL.
- Letter from Jacob Dieter to his wife and children from Fort Ridgley, Minnesota
- Letter from Jacob Dieter to his wife and children from Osage City, Kansas
- Letter from William Dieter to his son Jacob, Olmsted County, Minnesota
- Letter from Jacob Dieter to his wife and children from Camp Blackwater, Missouri
- Letter from Jacob Dieter to his wife and children from Independence, Missouri
- Letter from Jacob Dieter to his wife and children from Andersonville, Georgie
- Letter from Varnum Hadley to Martha Dieter
Jacob’s wife Martha eventually received a monthly pension as his widow and the mother of his children. She also was paid $100 for his time serving in Andersonville Prison. Their daughter, also named Martha, wrote about her family's wartime experiences, her father's death, and her mother's move to Rochester after the war in "A Pioneer Mother." Click or tap on the document to read the whole story.
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