By William Meiners
Herald Staff Writer
[private]It’s a somewhat nondescript headstone in Breckenridge’s Ridgelawn Cemetery. The marker simply reads “A.R. Porter First Michigan Engineers.” Earlier this month, however, the deceased’s story was told and celebrated by the Sons of Union Veterans of the Civil War (SUVCW).
Aaron Ruple Porter was one of the early settlers of Gratiot County. With lineage dating back to the Pilgrims, various Porter men had fought in the Revolutionary War and the War of 1812. Successive generations moved west from New York to Ohio and eventually Michigan.
At a Sunday ceremony, Dan Pourreau, a member of the SUVCW in Houston, provided some details about his great great grandfather. “Aaron was born in Elk, Ohio, in 1843, just 14 miles north of the Kentucky border,” he said. “By 1854, Aaron’s family had moved again, this time 300 miles north to Pine River in Gratiot County, Michigan, just a dozen miles west of here. The Porters were among a wave of settlers enticed by the Graduation Act, which had lowered the cost of property to 50 cents per acre.”
Times were hard all through Gratiot County. Clearing the land and building cabins to live in could prove to be backbreaking labor. In 1862, Aaron’s father and an older sister died within six months of each other. “So, at the ripe old age of 19, Aaron was now the head of the household having already lost his father, three brothers, and three sisters,” Pourreau reported. “Only his mother Julia and three sisters Ellen, Rebecca, and Mahala remained with him in the small cabin in Pine River.”
In late 1864, Porter, along with an older brother named Chauncey, “trekked together to Grand Rapids to enlist with the First Michigan Engineers and Mechanics.” Pourreau said neither of the brothers had military training, but “the hard life on the frontier had likely prepared them well, both physically and mentally, for what lie ahead.”
For Pourreau, this entire family history was unknown to him for the longest time. His mother, who was from Ohio, went to France on a Fulbright Scholarship. She met a Frenchmen in a cafeteria and Dan was born and raised primarily overseas.
Pourreau went to school in the States, earning degrees from Wooster, in Ohio, a master’s at Northwestern in Chicago, and a PhD at Penn State. But it wasn’t until he started looking into some of the ancestry programs like 23andMe that he discovered the rich family heritage dating back to the beginnings of this country.
“It was quite moving,” said Pourreau, who works in the chemical industry in Texas. “You start to understand the trials and tribulations, the hardships they went through. They moved to an area to build roads, churches, schools, and houses. Then they’d pack up and move another 400 miles and do it all over again.”
Since discovering his family’s history, Pourreau has gone in full hog, first joining the Sons of the Revolution, and later the SUVCW, where he now helps do the genealogical research for other perspective members. Learning of the military exploits of his ancestors helps personalize the war stories.
After what was likely basic training at Camp Owen in Marshall, the Porter brothers were sent south to Atlanta, “almost a month after the Confederates had surrendered the city.” The city was, by then, already in ruins. They were attached to General William Sherman’s unit on his famed “March to the Sea.”
As the Civil War drew closer to its end, the “scorched earth” tactics seemed set on destroying everything in the Union Army’s path. Pourreau reported his grandfather’s regiment kept pace with the infantry, “traveling over 10 miles a day,” in a combination of destruction and construction. They tore up railroad tracks, twisting rails, and burned bridges to thwart any process of the Confederates. Yet they also built bridges and spent days repairing and making roads through marshes.
In 25 days from Atlanta to Savannah, the regiment marched 250 miles. In further service that took them through the Carolinas, Richmond, Virginia, and a “Grand Review” celebration in Washington D.C., the brothers would travel about 2,700 miles in a single year before arriving back home in Michigan.
“Four years later, Aaron married a 21-year-old woman of Irish and German descent named Eliza Murphy,” Pourreau said. “They had five children together, the first my great grandfather Erastus. Aaron lived out his life farming in Pine River and Lafayette Township with his second son Archie, until his death in 1904 at the age of 61.”
Archie Porter was also a St. Louis firefighter. That hard work and shared sacrifice may impress Pourreau most about those families that first arrived in Gratiot County. Young men marching off to military service must have been a common occurrence. Pourreau said he counted some 50 Union soldier headstones in Ridgelawn Cemetery.
The Sunday headstone dedication, attended by SUVSW camps from Texas, Louisiana, and Michigan, included an honor guard shooting off muskets in salute. Pourreau also met a distant cousin, Jan Davis, the Michigan president of Daughters of Union Veterans of the Civil War. She’s married to Paul Davis, senior vice commander of SUVSW Camp 67 from Saginaw, Bay City, and Midland.
To end the ceremony, Pourreau read from President Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, words he finds relevant today. Lincoln said, “It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us — that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion — that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain — that in this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom — and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”
[private]