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--> --> May 9: Travels with John Hosford's ghost By David Morrill When I make the two-hour trip from my home in Tallahassee to the North Florida Gulf coast, one I make frequently this time of year, I cannot escape the fact that I pass through a territory that was once familiar to John W. Hosford. The countryside, mostly state and national forest, probably looks much as it did to Hosford 140 years ago. From north to south it unfolds from rolling hills to flat coastal plain, from live oak and long-leaf pine to cabbage palm, slash pine and scrub oak. Even the small communities along the way, Sumatra, Carrabelle and Magnolia Bluff, would be familiar to him. My fascination with Hosford began when I was in elementary school, when I first handled the bundle of Civil War letters, wrapped in faded blue ribbon that he wrote to my great-great grandmother Laura Rich. Over the years, I came to know the contents of the letters in intimate detail, even using them as a source for a college term paper. (It helped that the letters were published in an historical journal; deciphering the fading brown script was slow, tedious sledding.) They were eloquent letters of formal courtship written by a man in the most ghastly and informal of circumstances. Although I have, through the years, found out much about Hosford, there remain glaring gaps in the record. Unlike my Northern ancestors, who have, in true Yankee fashion, maintained an amply annotated, multi-branched family tree dating to Maine in the 1680s (I know for instance, that Sarah Elizabeth was killed by Indians, April 30, 1703, near Sanford, Maine, as she went out to fetch a pail of water), my southern forbearers lead me down blind alleys. The facts about John Hosford, as I know them, are these. He was born in Georgia in 1834 and moved to Gadsden County, Florida prior to the Civil War. He signed on with Company H, Fifth Florida Infantry, and was mustered in at Ricco's Bluff, just north of Apalachicola in March 1862. The Florida Fifth was assigned to Robert E. Lee's Army of Northern Virginia, and, over the next three years, took part in some of the most grisly fighting of the war. Hosford's letters describe the horrors of Fredericksburg, Chancellorsville, Gettysburg, Spotsylvania Court House and Cold Harbor, among other battles. In April 1865, after Lee's surrender, he was mustered out of service at Appomattox. Using a barrelhead for a table, sometimes one covering 150 pounds of gunpowder, Hosford wrote letters that tell a terrible but very personal story. The real enemy is always his separation from home and the butchery of the war. He knows "the pain of the families of both Yankees and Confederates whose boys have fallen." He despairs at the blighted landscape. "Cornfields are laid waste, houses are empty, fences are burnt, whole towns have been vacated." He writes of burying the dead near Rappahannock. "Sometimes there is only a part of a foot, sometimes a whole arm or half of a head." He describes the privation of southern soldiers as the war dragged on. "We are all nearly bare of clothes, some of the boys are barefooted." But he also describes brilliant sunsets over the snow-crested Virginia Blue Ridge. Most of all, he aches for home and Laura's company, although, after so many months away, "those things seem like an old sweet dream." Several months before Appomattox, Hosford's letters stop. Maybe there were more letters that didn't make the bundle. Maybe Laura dispatched a Dear John letter announcing her engagement to my great-great grandfather. I'll never know, of course, why Laura Rich, apparently rejected John Hosford. Maybe he was ugly. Maybe he cracked his knuckles in public and didn't take baths. Maybe he had no money. But such explanations are too easy. Surely there's more to the story. Laura did, after all, keep the letters. Although it is surely an opinion based on insufficient facts, and one that represents a claim for my own oblivion, I've always thought Laura should have married Hosford. Last year, scrolling through newly posted on-line marriage records, I discovered that John Hosford did, indeed, join the family. He married the sister of my great-great grandfather, the one who married Laura Rich. This brings me some comfort, though I'm still in the hunt for later records. Although genealogists can probably appreciate my quest, they would recognize me as a rank amateur. I never claimed, however, to be anything other than a dabbler, content to pursue my answers at a leisurely pace. John Hosford's ghost will help me tie up loose ends in due course. David Morrill is a Florida journalist and Northern California native. Email your... 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