Ellen Forbes Tolman

Pension File: 574183, 335290 (Special Act)
P.O.: Lawrence, Massachusetts
Service: various hospitals around D.C. from July, 1861 to February, 1863
Applied: 1886
Status: Accepted

Brace yourselves: here's a pension file I don't actually have. Horror!  So why do I have her up here?  Until a few weeks ago, I had no idea Tolman existed.  I didn't find her in my pre-D.C. survey for special acts, nor did she turn up while I was going through legislative files.  Instead, I found her through something of a back door.  While I was in D.C. she turned up in one of the files (Clara Hoyt) as a pension attorney.  I put her on the back burner though in favor of other rabbit holes.  When she turned up as attorney for two more women, and a witness for a third, I knew I had to do some serious digging.  Until that point, I had no idea she was ever a nurse!  But the more I dug, the more I realized I needed to include her in my study.
Here's a brief sketch based on what I've been able to find: According to her petition to Congress for a Special Act, Ellen Forbes (her maiden name) left her home in Maine just after the Battle of Bull Run to nurse in Washington.  She showed no signed of stopping until February, 1863, when she contracted typhus.  In her petition to Congress she wrote that "her attack of fever was proceeded by convulsions, and for twelve days thereafter all was a blank to her."  Tolman pulled through, but malarial abscesses kept her bed-bound for several more months, and on crutches for several more.  She returned to Washington in September, but new abscesses appeared and she returned home, sick again.
Here's the silver lining to the cloud: in February, 1864, Ellen Forbes married Eleazer Tolman from the 2nd Maine.  Schultz hints that they met while Tolman was in the hospital in D.C.--he was suffering from pleurisy and was discharged in 1862.  The two settled down in Lawrence, Massachusetts, and had three children.  Tolman applied for, and was granted, a $25 pension in 1886, endorsed by VP Hamlin and several respected veterans.  Then, in 1892, she pops in three completely unrelated pension files: Clara B. Hoyt, Emily Taylor, and Georgiana Smith.  There is nothing I can find to link these three women together other than the fact they served as nurses.  They never served in the same hospital, lived in the same area, nothing.  I'm betting, though, that it's a connection through the WRC or the Army Nurses Association.  The only way to find out for sure is to go look through her papers at the Maine Historical Society.  I love it when my nurses leave a paper trail.