| Samuel Eckerman Cormany |
| by Marilyn Gale |
Samuel Eckerman Cormany was the son of Jacob Cormany, a Pennsylvania farmer, and Mary Eckerman Cormany, Jacob’s third wife. Samuel was born on May 24, 1838 on his father’s farm eight miles north of Chambersburg in the Cumberland Valley. He had four older half-sisters, two older half-brothers, and two younger sisters. Samuel’s father died in 1855 and the farm passed jointly to his mother and his oldest half-brother John. The other siblings received modest cash settlements. He enrolled in a small United Brethren school in Pennsylvania called Mount Pleasant. The college closed during the economic slump that followed the panic of 1857. Thus, in the spring of 1859 he left Pennsylvania with several friends to enroll in the nation’s only remaining United Brethren college: Otterbein University. He was twenty-one years old, slightly under five feet six inches tall, and weighed a little over 130 pounds. He had hazel eyes, a light complexion, and dark hair. Samuel had been raised in the United Brethren faith and his father had served as a lay minister.
Cormany entered Otterbein for the spring term of 1859. He recited to Miss Gilbert in “Bullims Grammar---to Professor Haywood in H. Arithmetic and Algebra---to Professor Degmeyer in German and Professor Hammond in music. He also played second violin in the college orchestra.
He roomed and boarded at the home of Benjamin B. Bowman. Mr. Bowman, at this time was in Canada, tending to post harvest business and preparing to move his family back there. Mrs. Bowman and her six daughters were in Westerville. To finance their residence in Westerville, the Bowman women opened their large house to student boarders. Boarding was a common practice in nineteenth-century America, particularly in college towns. Otterbein registered 267 students for the spring term of 1859. The Bowmans had temporarily become hotelkeepers in order to allow Rachel to attend Otterbein. This action showed a real commitment to education in the Bowman family at a time when few women were sent to college and few colleges accepted them.
It was while boarding at the Bowman’s house that Samuel met Rachel who was in her senior year at Otterbein. Rachel was born April 12, 1836, on her father’s farm near the tiny agricultural hamlet of Carlisle Hill in what was then called Canada West (now the Province of Ontario. She had studied at Oberlin from 1854-1856. She had dark hair, dark eyes, was quite stout, and had plain features. Rachel graduated from Otterbein in 1859, in the third graduating class. In his diary on September, 1859, Samuel writes, “Mr. and Mrs. Bowman seem to me to be favorable of my attentions to their daughter Rachel and, honest John! I began to hope I may become acceptable to her ladyship—Miss Rachel herself in course of time—She certainly gives me indications that she cares a good deal for me.”
By September Samuel makes two significant decisions: He would go east to ask Rachel to marry him and share that new life, and he would use his inheritance to try to establish his own farm in Missouri. Rachel had gone to eastern Pennsylvania to teach in the Quakertown public schools. She accepted his proposal.
Cormany traveled to Macon County, Missouri and built an octagon shaped house for the young couple. Octagon houses are said to have many advantages, more direct sunlight, better ventilation, and efficient floor plans. Samuel returned to Westerville and they were married on November 25, 1860. They went to Canada on their honeymoon and while there conditions in the United States grew increasingly unsettled. Samuel reluctantly decided to postpone his return to the farm in Missouri, pending some resolution of the secession crises.
What begins as a honeymoon visit was becoming an ever-lengthening period of exile as the young couple waited to see when the situation in the United States would become more settled. On May 3, 1862 their daughter, Mary Cora Brittannia, was born.
The young family finally returned to Franklin, County, Pennsylvania, and the area where Samuel grew up. Once home, and faced with the threat of a Southern invasion, Samuel took the step he seemed fated for and enlisted in the Union army. He is mustered in as part of the 16th Volunteer Pennsylvania Cavalry.
Samuel left from Harrisburg, traveling through the Washington area, to join the Army of the Potomac, which was bogged down along the Fredericksburg-Rappahannock line on the Virginia front. Samuel found himself more and more frequently involved in actual combat. Cormany was involved in the Union offensive that was rebuffed at Chancellorsville (May, 1863) and the Confederate counteroffensive that culminated in the Battle of Gettysberg. On June 9, 1863 Cormany was involved in the Battle of Brandy Station, the largest cavalry action ever fought in North America.
On July 2, 1863 Cormany fought most of the second day of Gettysburg beside infantry forces on the right wing of the Union position. Two Confederate brigades had temporarily reached the top of Cemetery Hill, and Southern troops were entrenched for a renewed attack at the base of Culp’s Hill. The Confederates very nearly turned the Union right flank, but Confederate commanders, deprived of cavalry reconnaissance, never fully realized how much they had weakened the Union line in Cormany’s area. The Battle of Gettysburg reached a climax on July 3 when a Confederate effort to break the center of the Union line failed disastrously. That effort, which featured the massive infantry offensive known as Pickett’s Charge, began with what sill remains the largest artillery duel every waged in North America. Later, Union field gunners played a crucial role in repelling the infantry offensive and inflicted heavy casualties on the retreating Confederates after their attack had been turned. Lee was defeated at Gettysburg and driven back to Virginia. Cormany’s name is on the Pennsylvania marker at Gettysburg.
Between July, 1863 and November, 1864 the Union army in pursuit of the Confederate army forced them back into Virginia resulting in the Battle of Shepherdstown. During this battle, Cormany received a minor injury of his right arm. After Shephardstown, Samuel Cormany was promoted to Quartermaster Sergeant for conspicuous bravery.
Between November, 1863 and March, 1864 on the eastern front, the little known Mine-Run Campaign occurs. They maintained a steady, but restrained pressure upon crippled military forces of the Confederate and waited until spring to launch what they hoped would be their final offensive thrusts.
Between March, 1864 and June, 1864 there were two large-scale raids directed by General Sherman. First, they penetrated the outer defenses of Richmond in May, and the second resulted in the Battle of Trevilian Station in June. Samuel rode in both raids.
July, 1864 – December, 1864 Cormany’s regiment rejoin the main portion of the Army of the Potomac and in order to help Grant’s forces surround the key railroad city of Petersburg, Virginia.
The Appomattox Campaign began in April of 1865. General Lee was forced to abandon Petersburg and he made a desperate run for the safety of the Appalachian Mountains. Grant immediately ordeed his cavalry to try to overtake the fleeing Confederate to pin them down until his main infantry forces could move in for the kill. The 16th Pennsylvania Calvary was among those in the forefront of the chase. As a result Samuel was involved in the capture of the Confederate general Richard S. Ewell. At Appomattox Court House, Samuel’s regiment helped establish the advantageous Union position that convinced Lee to surrender rather than fight on.
Samuel Cormany’s military experiences are covered much more completely in the book, The Cormany Diaries, a Northern Family in the Civil Warby James C. Mohr (editor)
Rachel and Samuel were finally reunited on August 27, 1865. They spent several months visiting around following his discharge. By November, 1865, the Cormany’s finally reached Missouri. They were able to spend their fourth anniversary on their own farm. The octagon house Samuel built in 1860 had suffered severely from five years of vacancy and vandalism. The Cormany’s situation in Missouri never improved. They found themselves entangled in the bitter local politics of the Reconstruction era. In October, 1868 they sold their farm and joined a small party that was emigrating by prairie schooner to the plains of southern Kansas. There Samuel began to preach at frontier missions and Rachel opened a school. A son Benjamin was born to them, but he only lived six weeks. Samuel took up the Cherokee circuit of the United Brethren church. Rachel has a second daughter in 1871; they name her Harriet (Hattie).
In 1873, Samuel contracted “brainfever” and malaria. Doctors urged him to move farther north, so the Cormany requested a different circuit. They were assigned to Waterloo area of Canada. Samuel served there from April, 1873 to May, 1876. Rachel bore another daughter, but she only lived ten days. From May 1876 to February, 1878, Samuel served the United Brethren district of Fonthill, Ontario, just west of Niagara Falls.
Samuel’s health failed to improve so; he resigned from circuit riding in 1878 to try to recuperate in northern Michigan. There he served a small community church and began some modest business ventures “to secure the means to educate our daughter, Cora, now sixteen. In 1880, an admittedly proud Rachel sent Cora off to Otterbein.
During the 1880’s Rachel became very active in the Women’s Christian Temperance Union and in the national kindergarten movement. Cora graduated from Otterbein in 1885 and married the Reverend Lawrence Keister who would become president of another United Brethren school, Lebanon Valley College in Pennsylvania.
The Cormanys’ were appointed superintendent and assistant superintendent in the Pittsburgh Protestant Home for Boys. In the 1890’s Samuel resumed his ministerial career by accepting a pastorate in Bradenville, Pennsylvania. From there he went to Second United Brethren Church of Johnstown Pennsylvania. Hattie established herself as music teacher in Johnstown. Samuel’s poor health forced his retirement from preaching early in 1898. Rachel fell ill and succumbed to cancer on February 18, 1899. She was sixty-two years old and was buried in the Johnstown’s Grand View Cemetery.
Samuel, now disabled, lived alone for several years in various small communities around Johnstown. In one of those towns he met and married Almeda Truxel in April of 1904. They apparently subsisted on the Federal pension that had been granted to Samuel under the Invalid Veterans’ Act of 1890. Samuel’s old commander, John K. Robison, supported Samuel’s pension application with a letter of testimony that cited Cormany’s exploits during the war. Almeda died in 1915.
Samuel Cormany died April 20, 1921 at the age of eighty-two years. He is buried beside Rachel in Johnstown.