P.O.: Carthage, Illinois, then Lebanon, Oregon
Service: worked in the diet kitchen at Hickory Street Hospital, St. Louis
Applied: 1891
Status: Accepted (Special Act)
Etta Deuel was born January 22, 1838, in Ashtaula County, Ohio. On November 4, 1856, when she was just 18, she married Jared F. Hubbs in Ionia, Michigan. Things were on track for a long, quiet life together--their son Luther was born in 1860--and then the war broke out. Jared enlisted in Co. D, 3rd Michigan Cavalry, and like so many others caught typhoid fever. He was sent to Hickory Street Hospital in St. Louis, where his wife joined him to nurse him back to health (and what about little Luther?!). Etta worked at Hickory Street from September, 1862 to July, 1863. She started her work in the wards tending to her husband, but presumably as he recovered she began to work in the diet kitchen. The work, however, began to take a toll on her, and that July she was ordered to take a vacation. Her husband had been transferred to the 17th Veterans Reserve Corps, Co. D, and was out of any medical danger, so Etta returned home.
Jared made it through the rest of the war in one piece, and the couple moved to Carthage, Illinois, where they had two more children, Emma and Arthur, and Jared got work as a teamster, and then as an express agent at the local train station.
But then Jared's health began to fail. Jared applied for, and received, a pension in 1890--a whopping $4, which was, apparently, all the money coming in at one point. Etta's letters to the Bureau reveal her frustration and desperation: "is there anything that can be done for me," she wrote in October. "We both rendered the best service we could."
Turned out there was. My bet is the Woman's Relief Corps tipped her off, because when Etta applied for a nurse's pension, it was with the WRC backing her claim. In case that wasn't enough, Etta also had affidavits from former patients, a surgeon she had worked for, and several notables in Carthage. Congress granted her a $12 pension in February, 1891. Not much, but better than $4.
That seems to have worked for a while. Eventually Jared and Etta moved to Oregon to live with their daughter Emma and her brood, and in 1912 Jared received a pension increase to $30--it looks like some time in the intervening years he'd lost several fingers on one hand! It looks like it was the start of a downward swing for Jared though, because he died on August 4, 1914. Etta lost no time applying for a widow's pension, which paid a little more than her nurse's pension. It took her a while to get the claim through--she'd lost her marriage certificate , and there was no one old enough to remember her marriage to Jared all the way back in 1856. It took the Bureau almost two years to the day to approve Etta's claim, but approve it they did.
I was struck going through this file by Etta's letter to the Bureau--"we both rendered the best service we could." Consciously or not, Etta grouped her work in the hospitals in the same category as her husband's military service--not normally something you see in a period where nurses were increasingly portrayed as idealized, ministering angels separate from the trials and tribulations of army life. And when she died in 1923, Etta continued that trend. Rather than buy a generic stone marker, her daughter-in-law applied for a military headstone, to go alongside Jared's. It may have been in part a financial decision, but it was also a statement about this woman and how she chose to identify herself: that regardless of her gender, Etta Hubbs was a former member of the US Army, and a veteran, and no one was going to place her on a pedestal and put a halo on her head. This stone was for a woman, and not for an angel.
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| Hubb's gravestone in Lebanon, Oregon. From Find a Grave. |
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