UNION ARMY DISCHARGE OF HISTORICAL NOTE – Written by Shirley Donnelly and published in Beckley (WV) Post Herald, 26 August 1965, page 6
In my library is the Union Army discharge of William I. Wise, a private in Capt. Isaac M. Rucker’s company of the Seventh Regiment of West Virginia Cavalry Volunteers.
The discharge is dated 1 August 1865 and was issued in Charleston, WV. The document is prized, not because it is the discharge of a Yankee Cavalryman, but because it is a WV history item.
The discharge indicates Wise was 5’ 8” tall, of fair complexion, blue eyes, and light hair. He volunteered on March 1, 1854, to serve in the army and listed his occupation as a farmer.
The young fellow ran away to join the service under an assumed name. Following the death of his Father, the young lad’s mother remarried. When the stepfather became mean to the youth, the boy ran away.
The Civil War and military service offered the mistreated boy an out at that time. He gave his age 18 and signed up under an alias lest his folks try to get him out of his enlistment.
When he volunteered, he said, as the discharge shows, that he was born in Lawrence County, Ohio. His actual name was Isom Walters. Why he chose the name William I. Wise as his alias is unknown, he was an Irishman, which might explain the whole thing because most of the Irish are a law unto themselves.
In Buckley (WV) lives Charles H. Walters, a son of Isom Walters. After the Civil War ended and the New River coal fields began to open up, Isom Walters married and moved his family to Fayette County (WV) to rear his family.
After West Virginia issued a Medal of Honor for each of her sons who served in the new states (meaning WV) wartime units, the medal belonging to William I. Wise was never claimed by him. It was packed away with thousands of other medals in the state’s archives for nearly a century. A couple of years ago, Charles Walters obtained his father’s decoration. He, in turn, gave it to me as a historical WV keepsake.
It was folded five ways for a generation, causing slight deterioration of the material at the folds. Then someone had the idea of flattening the whole sheet and covering it with an acetate cover. After the discharge was issued to the teenage veteran, he was smart enough to have it recorded in the Lawrence County, Ohio courthouse on 16 August 1865. George A. Bertram was the recorder.
Mrs. Dixie Hollandsworth Bennett was born in the Gateway section near Fayetteville. Isom Walters, his sons George, now of Summerville, and Charles, now of Beckley, worked in the coal mines around the turn of the century.
In 1900 they lived in the Red Ash camp, a few miles west of Thurmond on the south side of New River. On the morning of 6 March 1900, Walters and his family overslept. They would be late for the “man trip” into the mine if they decided to eat breakfast.
Both sons favored going to work without breakfast, but the Father said, “No! We’ll eat!”
That morning at 7:16 am, the Red Ash mine exploded and killed every man and boy in it – 46 of them. The decision to eat breakfast spared the lives of the three Walters men (including Isom Walters).
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