Letters home

“This,” said Jay County historian Jane Spencer, “has just come together like a miracle.”
John Romeiser beamed in response.
Before him, on a table at the Jay County Historical Society’s museum, lay a three-ring binder of plastic sleeves. In each sleeve was a letter from Romeiser’s great-grandfather sent home to his mother during the Civil War.
A professor of French literature at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville, Romeiser presented the collection to the historical society Friday morning to be kept in its archives.
The timing couldn’t have been more appropriate. Today and Sunday, the historical society’s Heritage Festival will celebrate the contributions of Jay County citizens who went to war.
“I’d say there are roughly a couple dozen,” said Romeiser.
The earliest dates from Sept. 3, 1862.
Transcribing the letters and preserving them digitally took Romeiser about six months. He began work on the project in 1995.
“It was a hobby,” he said. “The letters are pretty legible.”
Wanting to share the collection, he first posted them on an Internet site dedicated to Indiana’s involvement in the Civil War. But that site later disappeared from the Web.
To provide the letters with a more permanent home in cyberspace, Romeiser then posted them on the Ancestry.com site.
That’s where they were discovered by the Jay County Historical Society.
Volunteer Chris Harris was doing some research in advance of this year’s festival.
One of the soldiers she was tracking down was Calvin W. Diggs, John Romeiser’s great-grandfather.
Born near Windsor, a speck on the Randolph County map southwest of Farmland, on Sept. 13, 1843, Calvin W. Diggs moved to Liber in Jay County in 1854 when his widowed mother took Joseph C. Hawkins as her second husband.
It was here that he received his education and grew to manhood.
“The only education he had was here,” said Romeiser. “Although it wasn’t truly his town, the best part of his life was here.”
A sketch of Diggs’s life says the move to Jay County was “in order to give him the advantages of educational facilities then afforded by the school at that place (Liber), and there he attended the greater portion of the time for the next eight years. He had not yet graduated when the war broke out, and in August, 1862, he enlisted in Company “A,” 84th Indiana Infantry, under Captain William Burres.”
Service in the Union infantry took him to the battle of Chickamauga in September of 1863 where in an attempt to save a wounded comrade he was captured by troops of the Confederacy.
For 14 months, he was held in prisons at Richmond and Danville in Virginia and at the brutal prison in Andersonville, Ga.
After the war, Diggs returned to east central Indiana, settling in Randolph County where he taught school and served in local government.
He died in 1912 and is buried in Fountain Park Cemetery, Winchester.
While the digitized versions of the letters are preserved on the Internet, the originals will be treated with care at the Jay County Historical Museum.
“They will be in acid-free folder and acid-free boxes,” said Spencer. “But we will have copies available.”
The copies go on public display for the first time this weekend during the Heritage Festival.
The festival will also see the launching of the historical society’s new book, “Jay County, Indiana Soldiers 1776-1929,” researched by John Lingo and Jeff King and compiled by Jane Spencer.
Some excerpts from the Civil War letters of Calvin Diggs to his mother back in Jay County:
July 22, 1863
“Dear Mother,
“After a good night’s sleep, I take my pen to write a few lines this morning.  It is quite early about half past 4. We heard last night that John Morgan was captured. We hope that it is true. We are having quite a debate as to whether he should be hung or paroled. Some think that he should be hung as a Guerilla, others think he should be treated as any other prisoner of war. Boys are getting excited over it. Breakfast is ready. So I must adjourn for a short time.”
Sept. 6, 1863
Two weeks before the battle of Chickamauga and his capture
“I do not think you need be alarmed about my safety. I have no idea that our regiment will become engaged. The men in front can hardly get a shot at them they retreat so fast. So you see the rear guards have a poor chance. We may have a fight at Chattanooga, but I do not think they will make a stand there. If they do, I am confident that they will be whipped.”[[In-content Ad]]