Charles Gordon LaBarr, Sr. was a Miller by trade. He was born in Pennsylvania and moved from New York to Iowa just as the Civil War was starting. As a grandson of Colonel Abraham LaBarr, 5th Battalion, Northampton Militia, of the Revolutionary War, he was a true unionist and a patriot.

He had seven sons during his lifetime, and he had lost one son, Daniel Sheldon LaBarr, having buried this one-year-old in Saratoga, New York in 1840. However, he was too old to serve in the Union Army in the Civil War, and so sent three sons to War in his stead.

I doubt there were many fathers who lost three sons to the Civil War, as did Charles, Sr. Abraham Lincoln wrote his famous letter to a woman who had lost four sons (read regularly by General Marshall to remind himself of the value of our sons lost in war), and that was evidently a rarity, at least in the Union Army. This must have weighed heavily upon him, but he kept on living and having additional children.

From what we have found, buried with him in Iowa is his son, Charles Gordon LaBarr, Jr., who was mortally wounded at the Battle of Shiloh and who died about two months later in the Regimental Hospital in Freeport, Illinois (and was transported home at some point, for burial). This must have taken place after 1870, however, because he buried his wife in Illinois, but he and several sons are in this family plot in Iowa. Charles, Sr., applied for and received a pension in the name of Charles, Jr.

His youngest son (youngest Army-aged at the time) was buried in Winnebago County, Illinois, having been struck and killed by lightening in Camp at Freeport, Illinois a day or so after his unit had been organized and federalized -- just days before his Regiment deployed for Wartime service. NOTE: There are two links for William. One is his actual grave in Illinois and the other is the "Memorial Only" inscription on his father's headstone in Iowa.

Perhaps the most tragic sacrifice of all was when his married son, Alonzo Hasey LaBarr (and his eldest), enlisted with the 7th Wisconsin Volunteer Infantry in 1864, and three months later he was killed in combat (probably close-quarter and perhaps he died having been seriously wounded and left to die on the field under constant enemy fire). The most tragic fact of this death is his Regiment recorded his death at Laurel Hill on 06 May 1864 and then "mustered him out of service" on 12 May. This is an indicator that his unit was part of a grueling and non-stop period of close-quarter combat with the enemy, and perhaps was unable to bury him at all.

We don't know where Alonzo is buried. He might still be in a hasty grave where he fell as a member of the Iron Brigade, Army of the Potomac, on the Laurel Hill/Spotsylvania Courthouse Battlefield. Most markers were lost before the burial details followed about a year later after the end of the Civil War. There are about 10,000 Union soldiers who were exhumed and moved to individual graves marked, "Unknown," at the Fredericksburg National Cemetery.

Life continues, and we celebrate the life of our Ancestor, Charles, Sr., who died peacefully in the home of his son-in-law, S.G. Clark, having lived a full life of hard work and of hope.