Simeon D. Woodard was born in 1843 in Canada, the son of Vermonter Dexter (1812-1895) and Artemissia (Dutcher, 1812-1898).
Simeon’s parents were married in 1829 and by 1851 the family was living in Norfolk County, Ontario, Canada. Sometime between 1855 and 1859 the family left Canada and by 1860 Simeon and his family had settled in Leoni, Jackson County.
Simeon stood 5’9” with blue eyes, light hair and a light complexion and was an 18-year-old farmer possibly living in Jackson County when he enlisted in Company B on May 13, 1861.
He was missing in action on July 2, 1863, at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, and returned to the regiment on September 19 at Baltimore, Maryland.
Simeon was killed in action on November 30, 1863, at Mine Run, Virginia, although Dan Crotty of Company F wrote some years after the war that Woodard's’ death was the result of his own “carelessness.” It was at Mine Run, wrote Crotty in 1876, “that we lost one of our best soldiers by his own carelessness, Simeon Woodard. When about to relieve a man on the picket line, he commenced to walk out to the post upright. We caution him to creep out, like the other men, but he don't heed our admonitions, so he takes the consequences. He had only moved a few rods when he dropped his gun and put back to the reserve. Sitting down, he drops off a corpse. We soon learn that he received his death wound through the bowels.”
Simeon was buried in Fredericksburg National Cemetery: grave 3691 (old 178).
His parents eventually settled in New Haven, Gratiot County, where they were both living along with a number of their children in 1870 and 1880. In 1886 his mother, was living in Michigan when she applied for and received a pension (no. 336,264).
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