Phebe Farmer

Pension File: 1138498
P.O.: Cureall, Missouri
Service: volunteer nurse at New Orleans
Applied: 1892
Status: Rejected

Today I started going through the nurses from the US Christian Commission.  There aren't many, just 9 out of the 179 files I have from after the ANPA.  Turns out there are actually 7--I misidentified two of the women, of which one was Farmer.  I was going to post another USSC nurse for you tonight, but I decided I wanted her story to go up instead.
From what I found in the file, Farmer was an intelligent woman who had a rough life.  She lived somewhere in the vicinity of New Orleans when the war broke out.  Her cousin and several other relatives joined the Confederate army, but she herself was born in Massachusetts and remained loyal to the North, as did her family.  Shortly after the war began they fled to New Orleans, where they waited out the war.  Apparently, General Banks issued an order preventing women from nursing in New Orleans hospitals (something I haven't corroborated yet), but Farmer still wanted to help, so she used her contacts in several Massachusetts regiments to have men sent from the hospitals to her home where she could tend to them herself.  She also arranged for her daughter to take one or two baskets of food a day to St. James Hospital.  This, she claimed, did the most good, since the food there killed more men than the bullets.  Farmer's husband also helped the Union war effort, though not in a medical capacity.  Apparently he knew the bayous and swamps better than most, and volunteered to help guide Bank's men through the area during the Red River campaign.  This, of course, made him very unpopular, and he disappeared sometime in 1867.
Thirty years later, Farmer was barely scrapping by, earning $1 a week at the local post office, so she put in a claim for a pension.  By her own admission she had more faith in a special act from Congress than in the ANPA due to the nature of her service, but her daughter as well as Annie Wittenmyer (apparently Farmer was a member of the WRC) and George B. Lowd (a former patient and now editor of the Home and Country magazine) urged her to apply under the ANPA.  Honestly, she'd have been better off not listening to Wittenmyer (I can't believe I'm saying it either), because as a volunteer nurse who had done the majority of her work at her home, not only did Farmer not appear on the rolls, she didn't even fall under the ANPA.  So the Bureau rejected her.  Even her connection to President Harrison was no help--the Harrison's were apparently old family friends.  But somehow I don't think it phased her.
Best news yet today: a quick google search turned up her daughter's papers at Louisiana State University.  I am putting in a request for those.  Right now.