John Draper Carpenter
John Draper Carpenter was born on 12 March 1842 in the hill country of Windham County, Vermont, on the Massachusetts line. His death return gives Halifax as his birthplace, and his obituary gives the next town east, Guilford. When he married in 1865 he named his parents as John Carpenter and Lois.
He went to the Civil War in another man's place. By the summer of 1864 the Union was filling its regiments by draft, and a man whose name was drawn could stay home if he put forward a substitute to serve for him. On 5 September 1864 John Carpenter, then twenty-two, enlisted as the substitute for Loven P. Fowler of Jamaica, a town in the same county. He was mustered into Company K of the 3rd Vermont Infantry and was soon transferred to Company E of the 11th Vermont, the regiment also called the 1st Vermont Heavy Artillery. It had been raised to man the forts around Washington, D.C., and since May 1864 it had been fighting as infantry.
That autumn the regiment was with General Philip Sheridan's army in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia. At dawn on 19 October 1864 the Confederate army under General Jubal Early surprised Sheridan's camps along Cedar Creek and drove them back in confusion. Sheridan rode back from Winchester to rally his men, and by evening the Confederates had been routed. John Carpenter was wounded at Cedar Creek, six weeks after he enlisted. He served out the war and was mustered out on 24 June 1865. He later drew an invalid pension for his service under certificate 149,248, and his company, E, is carved on his gravestone.
Seventeen days after his discharge, on 11 July 1865, he married Martha Dunican at Guilford. The marriage return calls him 21 and a farmer, and the Rev. Ethan Allen married them. They had at least nine children, beginning with Lola Martha in 1867.
His second wife was Carrie Rosabelle Harvey of Searsburg, thirty-two years younger. They had eleven children between 1893 and 1912, Alice Bell among them, born in 1896. The last, Dorothy, was born in 1912, when he was seventy. With the nine of his first marriage, he had twenty children, and his obituary counted all twenty among the living when he died.
In his last years John Carpenter was a laborer. His home was in what the Bennington Evening Banner called the Lyons district, and in August 1916 he moved into Bennington. His health was failing. On Monday, 20 November 1916, he was taken to the Vermont Soldiers' Home in Bennington, a state home for disabled and aged Union veterans, and he died there two days later, on 22 November, aged 74. His death return gives chronic endocarditis and myocarditis, and the paper called it dropsy, the old word for the swelling of a failing heart. The same return reads "Don't know" in every line about his parents. The funeral was held at the Soldiers' Home at half past two on the Friday afternoon, and he was buried in the Bennington Village Cemetery under a cross carved with his name, his years and his company.
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Cite: Heirology, "John Draper Carpenter (1842-1916)", https://heirology.com/ancestors/john-draper-carpenter-1842-1916-0a6c48.