They Did Not Make It Back

While leaders of governments call for war, the common man fights it. In 1861, Perry County, Pennsylvania, had a population of roughly twenty-three thousand people. Though the chest thumping warmongers gathered in the state capitol, not in the county seat of New Bloomfield, Perry Countians were some of the first to answer President Lincoln’s call for volunteers.

Men left their farms, their families, their blacksmith shops, and their classrooms to put down the rebellion. In many cases they also left their wives and small children behind, putting a heavy burden on those at home. Army pay was sent home to help put meals on the tables where empty chairs were now a part of daily life. Some of these chairs forever remained empty.

This book reveals nearly three hundred men, over 1% of the county’s total population, who never again occupied those chairs. It gives brief biographic sketches of who these men were, what happened to them—if known—and how they were related to each other by kinship or cause.

Some served nearly from the war’s beginning to the end. Some served only a few weeks. Disease claimed almost as many lives as did battle. Men as old as fifty-five and as young as sixteen perished. Wives and parents were destitute and spent years fighting government bureaucracy to gain a small pension. Much Civil War history focuses on the eastern theater of the war, however scores of Perry Countians fought and died on the battlefields of the Deep South and the Red River Valley.

Born and raised on a farm in western Perry County, Terry F. Bender has resided in the county all his life. He is a graduate of West Perry High School and attended Dickinson College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. He spent nearly forty years in the oil industry, first as a truck driver, then later in mid-level management. He and his wife Donna celebrated their fiftieth wedding anniversary in November 2024. They have three sons, five granddaughters, and three grandsons.Terry's hobbies include collecting and reading books on the Civil War, crossword puzzles, woodworking, cutting firewood, and doting on the grandchildren.