Time and time again since the 1950s, a large framed drawing in City Hall has drawn interest in how it got there, and why it was of interest to Oneonta. The drawing is of the infamous Andersonville Prison at Camp Sumter, Ga., as drawn from memory by a survivor of the Civil War encampment, Thomas O'Dea.
Some may have seen the drawing in recent months when it was on temporary display at the Greater Oneonta Historical Society's History Center at 183 Main St.
In 1952, the memento was discovered in the vault of City Hall, which was then at 242 Main St., presently the home of several Otsego County offices. City Clerk office personnel cleaned and polished the framed drawing and began looking into the history of it. They learned from Fred Crouch, a former Oneonta Police Department patrolman, that the Oneonta branch of the Grand Army of the Republic had given the drawing to the police department when it disbanded several years earlier. The drawing was in the police station and later placed in the clerk's vault around 1931. On the back are signatures of the policemen, including former Police Chief Frank Horton, and most all of the city officials of that time.
When discovered in July 1952, the drawing was heavy wood and glass frame. In more recent years it has been placed in a much lighter weight frame. When The Star published the article about the Andersonville drawing and the mystery of how the GAR got it, readers promptly chimed in about some local connections to the Civil War prison. Of the 35,000 Union soldiers held there, where 15,000 died, odds were very good that some local soldiers had been in that camp.
Correspondence came from Cherry Valley, Morris, Franklin and elsewhere. According to The Star of July 30, 1952, the "Oneonta area is also linked to the prison in fiction. Louis Allidi … produced a copy of John Brick's novel, 'Troubled Spring,' which mentioned that a Bill Andrews of Oneonta died in the camp. Mr. Allidi said he had no way of knowing whether 'Bill Andrews' was pure fiction or based on a real character."
Not fictional to Oneonta was Ira J. Emmons, born in Oneonta in 1840. He served for three years in Company D of the 3rd Cavalry Regiment at Albany. Confederate Command captured Emmons and his whole unit on April 20, 1864. Among other sites of imprisonment, Emmons spent 10½ months at Andersonville.
The rebels granted him a parole from Andersonville on Feb. 28, 1865. When asked after the war to relate the most thrilling event of the war, Emmons replied, "Getting released from prison with my skin and bones in working order." After returning to Oneonta in 1865 he left for the Chicago area in 1874.
Edwin R. Moore, then director of the Otsego County Veterans Service Agency, disclosed that his late mother, Mrs. Maude Roberts Moore, attended the old Delaware Literary Institute in Franklin when she was a girl, and told of how two of her schoolmates were Anderson sisters from Georgia. Either their father or grandfather had owned the land where Andersonville Prison was established, Mr. Moore said.
The artist, Thomas O'Dea, was a private of Company E., 16th Regiment, Maine Infantry Volunteers. The drawing was later lithographed. O'Dea dedicated the map with graphic drawings to the "parents, widows, orphans and friends of those who perished in the prison and to the remaining survivors."
On Monday: A fire in Cooperstown 50 years ago created a popular present-day park.
City Historian Mark Simonson's column appears twice weekly. On Saturdays, his column focuses on the area during the Depression and before. His Monday columns address local history after the Depression. If you have feedback or ideas about the column, write to him at The Daily Star, or email him at simmark@stny.rr.com. His website is www.oneontahistorian.com. His columns can be found at www.thedailystar.com/marksimonson.
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