Zephaniah T. Horine

Zephaniah T. “Zeph” Horine was born in 1830, reportedly in Shawneetown, Kentucky, but probably Shawneetown, Gallatin County, Illinois, just across the Ohio River from Kentucky.

In any case, “Zeph” came to western Michigan where by 1860 he was a sawyer working for the Eldred Lumber Company in Muskegon, Muskegon County.

He stood 5’5” with blue eyes, gray hair and a dark complexion, and was 31 years old, working as a sawyer in the lumber mills and living in Muskegon or Newaygo County when he enlisted in Company H on May 13, 1861. (Company H, formerly the “Muskegon Rangers,” was made up largely of men from the vicinity of Muskegon and Newaygo counties.) He was discharged for chronic rheumatism on October 3, 1861 at Fort Lyon, Virginia.

Following his discharge he apparently traveled to Chicago where he reentered the service as a Sergeant in Company H, One hundred and fifty-sixth Illinois infantry on February 15, 1865, for one year, and was mustered the same day. He was First Sergeant on March 9, but reduced to the ranks from First Sergeant per Regimental order no. 2 on April 19, 1865. He was on detached service in the Freedman’s Bureau per S.O. no. 177 from July through August of 1865, and mustered out on September 20, 1865, at Memphis, Tennessee.

“Zeph” probably never returned to Michigan, and after the war settled in Hanna, LaPorte County, Indiana before moving on to Carlton, Dickinson County, Kansas, where he was living in 1880. He was residing in Carlton in April of 1889 when he claimed that since his discharge he had “felt a numbness in my right arm” and that the numbness and pain “was light at first” but “increased ever since. After exposure to cold it is intense with loss of sense of touch and during these attacks I have no use of my arm for manual labor and can hardly feel the pulse by sense of touch. The pain is that in feeling that of rheumatism of which I am a sufferer, a disease known in medical literature as rheumatic palsy, . . . .”

He was married twice: first to Helen M. Rowley, whom he divorced on April 26, 1875 in LaPorte, Indiana; and to Bettie Wilson (d. 1919), on November 1, 1887 in Abilene, Kansas (Bettie was unable to read or write).

In 1880 (?) he applied for and received a pension (no. 253,694).

“Zeph” died in Kansas, probably of a heart attack, on June 9, 1902, and was presumably buried there.

In February of 1903 his widow also applied for and received a pension (no. 558,518).