Local Civil War Soldier’s Letters Home On Display In A New Exhibit

With the massive, historic Green-Wood Cemetery right in our backyard, there are so many stories to discover all the time — and there’s a great one that you can learn more about in person right now.

The letters of Samuel Sims, a Park Slope resident who went off to fight in the Civil War, were discovered by chance in 1993, when they were saved from the trash by a worker who had come to shut off the gas at the home of Sims’ grandson, who’d passed away a few years earlier, and his wife, who’d just died. The story of their discovery, eventual hand-off to Green-Wood, where Sims is interred, and the current exhibit at the Brooklyn Historical Society is detailed in a cool story on WNYC:

“I have been troubled with boils on my neck,” Samuel wrote to Lucretia from Kentucky in April 1863. “They have got well and now I have another somewhere else which makes it troublesome to ride.” Besides boils on his butt, Sims complains of bad food, mosquitoes, dust and fleas: the daily torments of a Civil War soldier. In one letter, he describes drinking boiled seawater and longing for his faucet back in Brooklyn.

WNYC notes that Sims was killed in battle in 1864 and buried in Virginia, before his body was returned to its final resting place in Green-Wood years later; however Green-Wood historian Jeff Richman, who wrote a book about Civil War veterans interred at the cemetery, noted in a blog post a few years back that Sims was buried here that same year, in an unmarked grave. According to Richman, in 1888 “comrades who had served with him raised the finds to mark his grave with this extraordinary monument,” pictured above and located in Grave 648, Lot 12512/56, Section 53/72.

Green-Wood has a number of items from Sims’ correspondences to his family — including, notably, some peach pits he carved into baskets and sent home to his fiancé. You can see the letters, along with others from Civil War soldiers, at the exhibit at the Brooklyn Historical Society through spring 2016; Green-Wood is also hosting an upcoming Civil War artifacts exhibition, To Bid You All Good Bye: Civil War Stories, which will be on display from May 23 to July 5.