Saturday, July 14, 2007

Horatio Barnhard

Horatio Barnhard was born 1833 in Ottawa County, Ohio, the son of Jacob (b. 1809) and Sarah (Hyland, d. 1836).

After the death of his first wife, Jacob married Ohio-born Lucinda or Lorinda Reed (b. 1820) in 1840, probably in Ohio. In the 1840s Horatio’s family moved from Ohio to Chicago where they were residing in 1845 or 1848. In any case they remained in Illinois but a few months before moving on to Muskegon, Muskegon County, Michigan, where they lived for a year before settling in the Newaygo County area, probably in Croton. (It is possible that only Horatio and his younger brother John made this emigration westward in the late 1840s followed in the mid-1850s by their parents and the rest of the family.)

By 1855 the family had moved to Dayton, Newaygo County, reportedly building the first house in the Township. On February 17, 1859, Horatio married Phoebe S. Stone (b. 1841), probably sister to Maryette Stone who married his brother John in 1860, and they had at least one child, a daughter Ocelia (d. 1863). By 1860 Horatio was a farmer living with his wife in Dayton.

Horatio stood 5’5” with blue eyes, sandy hair and a sandy complexion and was 29 years old and still living in Dayton when he enlisted with his younger brother John in Company H on March 12, 1862 at Grand Rapids for 3 years, and he was mustered the same day -- their younger half-brother Simon would enlist in Company K in August. (Company H, formerly the “Muskegon Rangers”, was made up largely of men from the vicinity of Muskegon and Newaygo counties.)

Wallace W. Dickinson, also of Company K, wrote that Barnhard received a slight wound in the head while the regiment was engaged during the action at Fair Oaks, Virginia on May 31, 1862, and he was subsequently absent sick in a general hospital in Washington, DC. He soon recovered, however, and rejoined the Regiment. Horatio was initially listed as missing in action on August 29, 1862, at Second Bull Run, but was in fact killed in action.

Horatio was presumably buried among the unknown soldiers removed from the battlefield at Second Bull Run and reinterred in Arlington National Cemetery.

In 1863 his widow applied for and received a pension (no. 149504). By 1871 she had remarried a Mr. Anderson.

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