Joseph J. Mosher

Joseph J. Mosher was born in 1842 in Michigan or New York, the son of Joseph (b. 1811) and stepson of Lucy (b, 1827).

New York native Joseph moved his family to Michigan from New York sometime before 1848 by which time he had apparently remarried to Michigan- born Lucy, possibly in Michigan. By 1850 Joseph (younger) was attending school with his siblings and living with his family on a farm in Lyons, Ionia County. By 1860 Joseph (younger) was a farm laborer still living with his family in Lyons, Ionia County, where his father also worked as a farmer.

Joseph was 19 years old and probably still living in Ionia County when he enlisted in Company E on May 13, 1861. (Company E was composed in large part by men from Clinton and Ingham counties, as well as parts of Ionia County.)

Shortly after the regiment arrived iat its first encampment near the Chain Bridge above Georgetown along the Potomac, Joseph was stricken with smallpox. He was probably first sent to a hospitla in Georgetown but soon admitted to Kalorama hospital for contagious diseases in Washington, DC, on July 11, 1861.

Joseph died of smallpox on July 20, 1861, in Washington, probably at Kalorama.

Assuming his remains were not returned to Michigan -- which was unlikely since he perished from a contagious disease -- then he was presumably buried in Washington, possibly at the Military Asylum cemetery near the Soldier’s Home, although there is no known record of this. Harmony cemetery, was the place of burial for those men who died from contagious diseases, but it was not opened until 1863. He may have been buried in whatever civil burial ground existed in or near Washington for the interment of those who died from contagious disease. And, of course he may have been buried on the hospital grounds.

No pension seems to be available.