Franklin County: David R. P. Shoemaker to Henry A. Bitner, April
9, 1862
[deleted: March]April, 9 [1]
Point Pleasant, Virginia
Dear Friend:
I received a letter
from you some time since,
which I will now proceed
to
answer. I should have
answered it sooner, but as
we were constantly expecting
marching orders, I thought I
would delay writing until
I could tell you our destination.
But as we are now
apparently as far from leaving
as we were when we first
came here, I will now write
to you and you can send
your answer to this place
&
I will be likely to receive it.
Your letters will always be
very welcome, as coming from
[page 2]
a locality where I have spent
a very short portion of my
life, and from a friend who
I learned to esteem. Should
there be any seeming
lack of
punctuality in my answers
you will attribute it to the
fact that a
military camp is
not the best place in the world
for writing and that the mails
in this part of the country are
very irregular.
Spring has finally made its
appearance here. Welcome, Spring
to all the sons of
Mars. We have
been wading through mud knee
deep all winter, and it seems
quite a novelty to walk on
terra firma again.
J. C. Fremont has superceded
General Rosecrans in this department
and made his headquarters at
Wheeling, and I hope something may be done this Spring.
There is a rumor
that we
will go to Tennessee. For the
last two weeks we
have been
drilled almost to death. Squad
drill from 6 to 7 A.M. Company
drill
from 9 to 11 A.M. Batalion
Drill from 2 to 4 ½ P.M. Dress
Parade from 5 to
5 ½ P.M. and
[deleted: n] non-commissioned officers
school from 7 to 8 in the evening.
If we don't soon become a well-drilled Regiment, we ought
to.
I wrote a letter to Uncle Conrad
some time since and received
no answer. Will you remind
him of it. My
respects to all
the friends, and compliments
to the ladies. Write soon and
let it be a long letter.
Your Friend
D.R.P. Shoemaker
Company E. 11th Regiment
Ohio VolunteerU.S.A.
P.S. The papers you were kind
enough to promise will be
thankfully received. We get
up a small sheet here sometimes
called the Eleventh Ohio. I
will send you a copy of the
next number.
David R. P. Shoemaker
Note
[1]
Although Shoemaker does not include the year,
we have determined that the letter was
written in 1862, based
on information about where the regiment was camped at the time
(see
Joshua H. Horton and Solomon Teverbaugh, A History of the Eleventh
Regiment,
Ohio Volunteer Infantry. Dayton, Ohio: W. J. Shuey, 1866, p.60).
