By Serge Bielanko
Some things, they never change.
Farm boys still stand knee-deep in the muck on rainy afternoons after school, staring up at the cloudy hills out by Snow Shoe or over on the outskirts of Spring Mills, daydreaming when they’re supposed to be hitting the chores. Young bucks thinking about a girl they fancy. I suspect that Eli Potter Tate, all of 15 and living out in rural Harris Township somewhere in the summer of 1860 was probably doing just that.A
Still I can’t say for sure. That’s the cruelty of these historical things for people like me. I’m so eager to peel back the skin of time so I can zoom in on things long buried. I want to sit on the front steps of some long-gone Bellefonte apothecary or some ghost of a Millheim general store and eavesdrop on the come-and-go gossip of a lost time. Not because I think the past was all good old days or anything like that. I don’t and they weren’t. It’s more because I am always trying to daydream about what it must have been like to be a human being living right here on this very land you and I live on today, back during the American Civil War.
The simpler gossip of the pre-war years is easier to imagine, I suppose. Old newspaper archives online are treasure troves of curious fascinating little tidbits about local life long ago.A
Who shot that big loud gobbler down by Penns Creek?
What group of young ladies was seen giggling over in the courthouse square?
How many goats escaped from Farmer Musser’s pen last Sunday morning?
“I’m so eager to peel back the skin of time so I can zoom in on things long buried”
– Serge Bielanko
Stuff like that. But once the war came, once the darkness of its reality swept through the land like some plague of locusts unleashed from the mountaintop/ the old-time porch talk changed a lot. And so it would seem, so did the daydreams of the people up and down every dirt path in this county. For with the war came a new sort of gossip. A darker breed of chatter, if you will.
Is it true about Silas from across the road?
How is his poor mother taking it?
Those Rebs killed two of the Moyer boys on the same day? I can’t believe they’re never coming back.
That war gossip, for a young guy like Eli Potter Tate, must have been dizzying and alluring at first. The idea of glory. The sense of patriotic fervor and everything that comes with it. Then maybe frightening after a while when news began to float back of the deaths, of the powerful losses that Centre County was experiencing as many of her sons perished far from home. As the years wore on, more and more people were dying. Boys barely 18, many not even that old probably, they marched into deaths both legendary and inglorious. Some died in the heat of battle, shot in the chest or the neck or the thigh. Many more died on hospital cots, gripped by dysentery or fever. They died mostly alone. No fanfare. No parades. No nothing.A
For my wife’s great great great grandfather, then, for the Tate kid who was, by most accounts, just barely 18 years old in the late winter of 1864, the war must have been a terribly confusing thing. Politics aside, I try to imagine what kind of spirit or guts it would have taken for a kid like Eli to decide, three years into what had become a bloody and awful war, to enlist. To go. To join up and leave the farm and travel away into the same dark void that so many other fellows that he must have known had vanished into.A
Forever.A
In the summer of 1862, President Abraham Lincoln issued a desperate call. He needed 300,000 United States men to volunteer for the army for three years. The war was just over a year old. Response to his rallying cry was lukewarm here in Pennsylvania. Some men simply didn’t want to get involved.A
But some did. And urgently. Today, if you drive down Route 192 into Rebersburg, you can see the monument dedicated to Company A of the 148th Pennsylvania Volunteers. It stands on the exact spot where a slew of Brush Valley and Penns Valley men signed on to Colonel James Beaver’s new regiment, aptly deemed ‘The Centre County Regiment’ due to its heavy population of county soldiers. For these local men in 1862 to have responded the way they did, there must have been something fiery in the air, some kind of spirited patriotic obligation or desire. Around here, there were quite a few lads who didn’t want to go to war. And they didn’t. But there were also a lot who did. And these county men threw themselves at the chance to march off alongside their neighbors and friends.
They signed on to fight Bobby Lee. They marched away from the only home most of them had ever known to teach the damn Rebels a lesson they’d never forget.A
Many died. More lived, of course, but their lives were forever altered by what they experienced.A
Eli Tate, around 16 at the time, must have seen many of those soldiers leaving proudly for the war. Then he must have witnessed at least a few of those same soldiers when they came stumbling home. Their arms blown off. Legs missing. Hobbling around on crutches, making small talk on the street, perhaps, or sitting alone in the shade staring at their stump.A
You would think he might have had second thoughts about wanting to risk that kind of fate for himself. You might think that a after seeing with his very own eyes the weeping girlfriend of the freshly killed boy down the lane, or the newly crippled young man wandering the streets of Bellefontea that he might have tried like hell to avoid going.A
“That war gossip, for a young guy like Eli Potter Tate, must have been dizzying and alluring at first. The idea of glory. The sense of patriotic fervor and everything that comes with it”
– Serge Bielanko
Thousands and thousands had died since the start of the war, when fired-up patriotism had blinded many to the coming realities of war. The end of the thing was nowhere in sight. Any promises made by politicos or quick-talking recruitment officers had to be considered with a shrewder, more jaded ear than they once were. Everything about the war had gone from excited and confident to confused and exhausted.A
However, there were still Americans who were willing to go. To fight.
So it happens that one morning in the blustery late winter of 1864, when nature was locked down and the skies seemed forever bleak, young Eli Tate bit his lip and walked into a building in Boalsburg to speak his name and become a soldier. Around that same time, he got married to a Boalsburg lady, a Miss Julia Johnstonbaugh. Her brother, JC, also signed on to fight with the 148th within days of Eli doing it.
As it goes with so many Civil War things, I most certainly need the ancestry records and the history books and the soldier’s letters of the time to get me started with all of this. But eventually I realize that I need my own imagination to zoom in even closer.
Were Eli and Julia married before he enlisted? I can’t find the exact dates of their union, but if they were: were they all together when JC and Eli left for the war?A
Was the teen-aged Julia standing there watching her beloved husband (or maybe just her fiancA(C)) and her dear brother leave home at the same exact time?A
Can you imagine that?
We have to try, don’t we?
Even if we can’t say for sure, we surely have to try.
No diaries have ever shown up. As is the case with most Civil War soldiers, Private Eli Potter Tate of Company C, 148th Pa Vols. likely wrote a bunch of letters home from the mud holes and trenches he knew, from the roadside rest stops and hospital beds that soon became his world. Although if he did I’ve never heard of them. For every wonderful a or even basica account we have been lucky enough to hold on to from actual Civil War soldiers, millions more have been lost to time. Once tangible treasures never to be read again.A
Somewhere down in that notion is where, I guess, I slip away from the same old tired ways of history. Yeah, of course, I understand that the battle maps and the movements of the troops all create the basis for our understanding of what truly occurred at Gettysburg or in The Wilderness or any of the battles, big or small, that happened along the way. I get thata | I do. But for me, the minds of the Civil War foot soldiers matter most: all of their deepest fears and desires and hopes and anxieties, those are the things most intriguing to me.A
I hate the wide chasm that prevents us from ever really knowing the past like we know the present. I despise the fact that I can’t ever seem to know guys like Private Potter Tate as much as I want.A
Is that selfish of me?
History: always pulling me in just to push me away again.
Down at his grave, in Meyer Cemetery, not far from the State College airport, I stand there with my wife, Arle, Eli’s flesh and blood great granddaughter. She is a living reminder of his existence once. I look at her and it fascinates me. She has Civil War soldier blood pumping through her veins right now. It’s a weird sentiment, but I’m just being honest here.A
The wind is blowing and I can hear a jet taking off for some distant place.A
“Everything about the war had gone from excited and confident to confused and exhausted”
-A Serge Bielanko
I know from census reports that Eli Tate’s family were renter farmers, tenants if you will, because they were always listed in some new area of the county, some new farm they’d leased along the way. I also know that he was the oldest child, the oldest son, and his role on the farm when he took off for the war must have been substantial. His parents likely depended a lot on his labors as his father eased into older age.
In one photo we have of Eli, the best one of all, he is still young. In it, he wears his uniform. He is not smiling, but he is not snarling either; he merely peers into the camera lens/ across the centuries to come/ at some distant great-grandson-in-law or whatever the hell I might be to him/ and he freezes me in my tracks. I am taken aback by this portrait of the past. My wife’s past. Our nation’s past. So much past. I am stunned by this visual so often denied the ancestors of Civil War soldiers.A
Private Eli P. Tate glancing across the universe into my Centre County kitchen. Sometimes I feel as if I could spend the rest of my life trying to imagine what it was like for him.A
That war, I mean.
And then afterward.
His life with Julia. Their 10 children together, at least a few who died before their mother and father. The farms he rented, just like his dad before him. Fishing in the same creeks me and you fish in. Walking down Bishop Street in Bellefonte every now and then, same as me and you do. Listening to the wind in the summer treetops just like me and you do. Remembering the screams of the men at Spotsylvania, just like me and you can never ever do.
What was it like to be him?
He was wounded three times in battle. That’s what they say in the History of the Juniata Valley books. But I can’t be sure. I have heard he got hurt twice. Regardless, we do know Private Tate didn’t escape unscathed. In fact, in the only other photo my wife has of him there seems to be a clue. In that picture he is striking and handsome and fit. An old grandfatherly figure seated in a chair alongside family outside his son’s farmhouse in Mifflin County. There, if you look closely, you can see a cane.
I have heard that he needed it all of his life after the war due to a bad leg wound he received. I often imagine that it happened in Spotsylvania. There, the 148th was thrust into the ‘Heart of Hell’, as Centre Hall historian, Jeffrey Wert, refers to it in his electrifying 2022 account of that battle titled, appropriately enough, The Heart of Hell.A
I close my eyes and venture somewhere down in there, down into that heaving close combat. One of the war’s fiercest battles, they say. Private Eli Potter Tate was hit there. Either shot or stabbed in the leg or stepped on or run over by a horse. Who knows. But maybe that is where the cane originated from. I don’t know for certain yet, but I will continue to try to find out for the rest of my life. I don’t know why. I just will.A
In any case, he remained in the army after he recovered and the next year, 1865, during one of the final gasps of the Confederate Army’s attempts to stave off their certain demise, we know that E.P. Tate was wounded again. On March 31st, in the midst of what seemed like an endless battering of rain storms, as the Second Corps tried to roll up on Lee’s far end and force him out into the open from the trenches where they hunkered down, he was injured once more. It was known as the Battle of White Oak Road. Some call it the Battle of Hatcher’s Run.A
I don’t know what part of him was hurt that day either. What I do know is that I constantly wonder what it all must have felt like. A year and a month in the Army of the Potomac and he’d been wounded at least twice, been in and out of hospitals a couple of times, and seen many of his friends and fellow soldiers perish right before his still young eyes.
I try to dream up that mud-world landscape of his final battle.A
The packs of dead on the ground; their open eyes unblinking; their faces surprised.A
Thundering horses, no riders at all, moving by him as he looked down at his own bloodied hand or his gashed knee or whatever it was. I try to imagine the wince on his face as he went hobbling toward the back of the lines. All these years later, I spot him through the smoke: just a farm kid from Centre County looking for someone. Looking for something. Just a country boy wandering alone, searching for peace in the violent southern evening.A
This is the first profile in a Bellefonte.com series about Centre County’s Civil War Soldiers.A
If you have any photos, documents, etc of Eli Potter Tate (1845-1914) or Julia Johnstonbaugh Tate (1846-1905) PLEASE reach out to the writer at sergebielanko@gmail.com. Thanks!
Serge Bielanko is a Centre County writer, husband, and dad.A Check out more of his writing on Thunder Pie.A
