Mary Madole

Pension: 1130478, 854165
P.O.: 2244 Cass Ave., St. Louis, Missouri
Service: contract nurse at St. James General Hospital, New Orleans, from Nov. 30, 1862 to April 16, 1864
Applied: September 2, 1892
Status: Accepted

Another day, another profile.
Meet Mary Madole, née Flaherty, born May 5th or May 9th, in 1833 or 1838 (depending on which record you look at), in Galway, Ireland.  She immigrated to the States in 1853, and married Richard Knight, who died shortly after.  A respectable widow then, she became a contract nurse at St. James General Hospital in New Orleans--the building is still standing, to an extent; it's now the heavily renovated Board of Trade Plaza--where she served from late November, 1862 to mid-April, 1864.
During the winter of 1863/64, Mary took on a new patient: Joseph H. Madole, a private in Co. D, 147th New York, who was in the hospital with "febris" (a fever).
I always get a smile out of hospital romances.  Poor Dorothea Dix was fighting a losing battle trying to prevent those from happening.
Mary and Joseph were married in the hospital on March 29, 1864.  They then boarded a hospital ship where they both served as nurses (what a honeymoon), and settled in St. Louis, where Joseph worked as a Post Office clerk.  Both were members of St. Leo's, the Catholic church just down the street.  Joseph was also active in the community: he was a member of the Ancient Order of United Workmen (AOUW), and the local GAR post, Ransom.  Mary and Joseph had six children together, including Honora, or Annie as she was also known, Martha, and Mary, or Mamie.  Unfortunately, none of them lived past 1900.  Mary was the last, dying in October, 1900, just three months after her father.
Based on what little I've been able to find, it looks like Mary continued to live in the family home.  In until 1918, when she fell and injured her hip.  She was sent to St. John's Hospital, where she wrote to the Bureau asking for them to change her pension from nurse to widow--widows' pensions had been increased in 1916 to $25, but not nurses' pensions.  The Bureau was still in the middle of processing her claim when she died at Mercy Home on May 30, 1919.  She's buried in Calvary Cemetery, St. Louis, alongside her husband and daughter.

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.