Dozens From Oak Creek Township Fought In Civil War
Nine decades before Oak Creek became a city, dozens of its young men served in the Civil War, with roughly half being killed or wounded in battle or dying of diseases in faraway places like Tennessee, Georgia and Virginia.
The year 2012 marks the 150th anniversary of when large numbers of men marched out of Oak Creek Township and into the war. Two would die in Tennessee only four months later, and seven more would be wounded in the same battle, one case eventually proving fatal.
The youngest Oak Creek soldier to die during the entire war was 17, according to the few records that are available. The oldest was 43; one of that man's sons served in the famed Iron Brigade and was wounded three times.
Oak Creek Township consisted of modern-day Oak Creek and South Milwaukee. White pioneers had arrived in the late 1830s and 1840s, at a time when Native Americans hunted and fished in the area. Wisconsin became a state in 1848, South Milwaukee incorporated as a village in 1892 and a city a few years later, and Oak Creek did not become a city until 1955.
A total of 38 men from the township served in Company K of the 24th Wisconsin Volunteer Infantry, according to "Wisconsin Volunteers, War of the Rebellion, 1861-1865," an invaluable research book that has been put online by the Wisconsin Historical Society. One of them joined in 1864, so the number from Oak Creek when the company went into the war in 1862 was 37.
The dead included two cousins – Frederick Fowle of Company K, in 1863 of wounds received in the Tennessee battle, and Royal Fowle, an artilleryman in another unit who died of disease in 1864 in Louisville, Ky. Disease was an equal-opportunity killer of Union soldiers and Confederates in the war; many units lost more men to illness than in battles.
Frederick was the son of Frederick Fowle Sr. and Electra Rawson, while Royal was the son of John Fowle Jr. and Lavina Fowle, according to Judy Balestrieri, a descendant of the Fowle clan and a mainstay of the South Milwaukee Historical Society.
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One of five children, Shockley grew up on a farm outside Snow Hill. He goes so far back, and remembers so much, that family and friends routinely quiz him on history and genealogy. "My grandfather Shockley was drafted to go in the Union Army.
Courtesy of Tom Mueller Nine decades before Oak Creek became a city, dozens of its young men served in the Civil War, with roughly half being killed or wounded in battle or dying of diseases in faraway places like Tennessee, Georgia and Virginia.
But Verhaalen was wounded and taken prisoner nine months later in the epic battle at Chickamauga, Ga., on Sept. 20, 1863. He quickly was shipped to Richmond, Va., the Confederate capital, probably to a prison known as Belle Island,
