The annals of Gettysburg will likely never be complete, as tens of thousands of soldiers and civilians were caught up in the deadly battle that proved the turning point of the Civil War. One who would not have remembered her exciting role in the fight was young Jennie Weikert, age 2 during the early summer of 1863.
Emma Jennie was born on August 7, 1860 in Cumberland Township, the firstborn of her parents John Thomas and Sarah Keefauver Weikert. Three brothers would follow in later years.1
The winds of war soon accompanied her arrival, and with the election of Abraham Lincoln a few months later, the nation erupted in disunion.
John, Jennie’s father, was both a farmer and a well-respected carpenter. His father, George Weikert, owned a farm nearby, close to the Round Tops – north of what would later be called “The Valley of Death”. While records vary as to the location of John’s residence, he owned a farm near his father.2
On Jennie’s second birthday in 1862, John Weikert enlisted in Company B, 138th Pennsylvania Infantry. He was not at home for much of that year or the following year, when Confederate troops approached his home. His regiment was deployed further south in Virginia at the time.3
Alone with their young daughter on July 2, 1863, Sarah was decidedly on edge when she heard the sounds of battle. “I caught little Jennie up in my arms,”
she remembered , “and ran to the front gate. We knew a battle was to be fought, but did not think it would be so close to our home.
”4
Sarah saw the rapid approach of a cavalry soldier. In a panic, she called to him as he galloped by. When he slowed, she threw the toddler into his arms, crying, “Save my baby!
” She said he “laid her across the saddle of his horse and galloped away.”5
She did not know his name, or to which regiment, brigade, or division he belonged.
The Union scout carried Jennie to a house farther south, along “the outskirts of the village” and asked the woman living there to take the child. He “put the little girl on the porch and galloped away.”6
Later that morning, realizing that their property would become the epicenter of the storm, Sarah left with her in-laws and was gone from Gettysburg for several days. It seems incredible that she never mentioned any concern for her daughter.
When the Weikerts returned after the battle, they saw that their properties were practically destroyed and overflowing with wounded and dead. “I looked into the front door
,” Sarah recalled, “and there were so many dead men lying on the floor that it would have been impossible to have walked through the hall without stepping on the bodies.”7
Sarah spent many hours upon her return to search for Jennie, and finally found her at the house where the cavalry soldier had deposited her. Sarah then took Jennie to a friend’s home and returned to help the wounded and salvage what she could of the family property.8
“The horrible part of it all was to see the dead buried
,” she said. “Those that were only slightly injured dug trenches. Into these the corpses were placed, sometimes one upon another. A short prayer was read; then the earth thrown in….How anyone lived through those awful days no one ever will know.”9
Since the family’s crops were destroyed, Sarah worked in the fields, plowing crops and making hay into bales. The work was hot and difficult, but the men were away fighting the war, and the women were left to work. Sarah was paid a dollar a day for her efforts. “That dollar took care of Jennie and myself,” she remembered.10
Mrs. Weikert also took time to tend the wounded, and spent much of the nights baking bread with a group of women for the soldiers in her care. “I remember that bread very well,” one veteran declared at the 1913 reunion at Gettysburg, “ and the women of this town were just as heroic as any man who ever led a charge.”11
Jennie did not remember her ride, or the aftermath.
Later that fall, her father, Private John T. Weikert, was seriously wounded with a shattered right arm when he was shot at Payne’s Farm during the Mine Run Campaign. He was sent home to recuperate.12
After the war, John and Sarah Weikert were separated – one of the rarely mentioned casualties of war. John claimed that his wife was unfaithful to him during the war, and the couple remained estranged for several years. It is possible that the murky documentation of the birth of Charles Weikert was a factor. They eventually reconciled, and two more sons were born: Albert in 1873, and Oliver Harvey in 1877.13
Jennie married Charles Strausbaugh in 1881, and the couple lived in Adams County for the rest of their lives. Three surviving children were born to them: Grace in 1882, Belle Sarah in 1886, and Jeremiah in 1888.14
She attended, with her mother, the Grand Reunion at Gettysburg in 1913. Her mother told the story of Jennie’s ride with a Union cavalry soldier on July 2. Jennie also met with some of the men her mother had fed and aided in the aftermath of the battle.15
When Charles died in 1925, Jennie moved in with her daughter, Grace, and her husband J.M. Rider, in Greenmount. She died at age eighty on December 14, 1940, after a long battle with breast cancer and other ailments for which “she always refused treatment.”16
Like her father, mother, and husband, Jennie was buried in Evergreen Cemetery – just a mile as the crow flies from where she was thrown into the arms of a Union scout, a man who was kind enough to retrieve the bundle thrown from a mother’s panicked arms on an excessively warm summer day in 1863.
Sources: Adams County Independent (Littlestown), Dec. 19, 1940. Ancestry.com: John T. Weikert Family Tree. Ancestry.com: Death Certificate, Jennie Weikert Strausbaugh, Dec. 14, 1940. The Gettysburg Times, 23 June, 1919. The Gettysburg Times, Dec. 14, 1940. John Weikert Military Records, National Archives. “Pickett’s Men Listen to Heroine of Battle”, The Philadelphia Press, July 4, 1913. Copy, Participant Accounts, Adams County Historical Society (hereafter ACHS). Weikert Family File, ACHS.
End Notes:
1. John Weikert Family Tree, Ancestry. Weikert Family File, ACHS.
2. Ibid.
3. John T. Weikert Military Records, NA.
4. Philadephia Press, July 4, 1913, p. 2.
5. Ibid.
6. Ibid.
7. Ibid, p. 3.
8. Ibid, p. 4.
9. Ibid, p. 3.
10. Ibid. While some records list Charles as an infant during the battle, never in her narrative does Mrs. Weikert mention him. She only speaks of Jennie, and calls her “my baby”, therefore, Charles was most likely born after the battle. It also appears that Sarah was not heavily expectant at the time of the battle, as she doesn't mention that either.
11. Ibid., p. 4.
12. John Weikert Military Records, NA.
13. Weikert Family File, ACHS.
14. John Weikert Family Tree,
Ancestry.com.
15. Philadelphia Press, July 4, 1913, p. 2. The Gettysburg Times, 23 June,
1919. John Weikert was still
living at the time of the reunion,
though no mention is made about
him. He died in 1916 of apoplexy
(a stroke). Sarah is mentioned
in his obituary as his widow.
16. Death Certificate: Jennie Weikert Strausbaugh, Dec. 14, 1940.
