© Copyright 2000 James David Pearce
AFTER
When James Pierce died of typhoid fever in the Beaufort military hospital in April 1864, he was only 18. He was temporarily buried in Hammond General Hospital Cemetery, Grave No. 88. His body was later moved and re-interred in Veterans Administration National Cemetery in New Bern, N.C., Section 11, Grave No. 1962. He never had a chance to realize his hopes of living in another and brighter world.
While James was dying in the hospital, a band of Confederate saboteurs went ashore on Cape Lookout and dynamited both lighthouses. They totally destroyed the old lighthouse, and managed to put the newer one out of commission. It was repaired after the war and still is in use.
Cincinnatus and his family stayed in Beaufort for a few months after the end of the war in 1865, but homesickness soon set in and his family is listed in the Hertford County census in 1870. Milly died and Cit married twice more, eventually having 13 children and living until 1897. Lucretia stayed on the farm near her river until she died in 1885. Nothing is known of what became of Abigail, Job and Priscilla, or Adolphus Askew.
Isaac married Annie Maria Salter in Beaufort in 1864, not long after James died. He was a sergeant for most of his Union army service, but was reduced to private when several companies were merged and he was disabled by a broken leg shortly before the end of the war in 1865. He is listed with his wife and three small children in the Carteret County census of 1870.
Isaac moved his family to Hertford County in 1871, using a flatboat he built himself to negotiate Pamlico and Albemarle sounds to the Chowan and Wiccacon rivers. He and Annie Maria had seven boys and one girl. (The first-born son died while still a child.) They moved from Trap, Bertie County, to Phoebus, Va., in the early 1890s, and lived well past the turn of the century. Annie Maria died in 1916, and Isaac died in 1924. Around 1900, Isaac's sons decided to settle on the spelling "Pearce" for the family name, hoping to put an end to confusion arising from various earlier spellings.
In 1889, Isaac applied to the federal government for a pension, and then was named census enumerator for Union Army veterans and widows in his Bertie County township. That application, and his later requests for pension increases, set off in-depth investigations of his service in both armies.
Those requests, and the depositions and affidavits which follow here, add a poignant final chapter about the lives of the Hertford County farm boys, their families and fellow soldiers on both sides of the cruel conflict in the black-water country of Eastern North Carolina.
~~~~~~~~~
click here to go to the next chapter