The following letter was written by Garret Alonzo Empie (1832-1906), the son of John Isaac Empie (1807-1878) and Magdalena Becker (1804-1840) of Schoharie county, New York. Garret was married in 1853 to Emma Pool (1829-1880) and they had at least two children prior to 1860.

According to his military records, Garret enlisted on 27 September 1864 at Albany, New York, to serve one year in Co. E, 175th New York Infantry. He was 32 years old and employed as a laborer at the time of his enlistment. He stood 5 feet 9 inches tall, had grey eyes and brown hair. He gave his birthplace as Sharon, New York. He mustered out of the service with his company at Savannah, Georgia, on 30 June 1865. In the 1872 Schoharie County Gazetteer, he was listed as a farmer in Argusville.

Garret was killed in a street car accident en route to his home near Dayton, Ohio, in 1906.

Transcription

Camp Sherman
Blairs Landing, South Carolina ¹
March 23, 1865

Dear Emma,

How do you and the children do today? I am well and hope that when this reaches you that you are all well. We are at the Camp Distribution yet but I wish that I was to my regiment. I would feel more at home with my own boys. The reason that they call this Camp Sherman is that he camped on this ground two days and two nights with his army a few days before he took Charleston and Fort Sumter—that is 60 miles from here by water. I don’t [know] how far it is by land. We came by Fort Sumter and Charleston when we came here. It is quite a place but it ain’t as nice as Fort Monroe. That is a nice place and so is Hilton Head a nice place, but this place ain’t much. At the landing is the only house that is here. On the plantation, they was a lot of nigger huts but them are all tore down. The man that did own this mansion and this plantation is in the rebel army. He is the General Beauford. He owns four large plantations but now our folks has confiscated it and they will sell it so I think that he won’t make much by it.

Oh Emma, what do you think? I have quit chewing tobacco! I can’t afford it. It cost $2.50 and 3.00 per pound. That is to much for me. But it goes tuff. But I will try to tuff it out.

Now about the weather, it has been very nice and warm since we have been here but yesterday afternoon—then it rained quite hard, but today it is nice and clear—not quite as hot at it was before the rain. I don’t know when we shall leave here but they say we will go in a few days. I want to get there for I want to hear from home. There must be some letters there for me by this time. But I suppose that I will have it harder there than here for here we have nothing to do—only cook, eat, sleep, read. We have no guns so we can’t stand guard nor picket nor drill so we ain’t got to be out nights.

Some say that our brigade has left Savannah and gone to North Carolina to do provost duty at Morehead City. How it is, I don’t know. Some says that they are at Savannah yet. We hear so many camp stories, we don’t know which to believe, but it don’t make no difference about your writing. Direct to Washington to Co. E, 175 New York Vols. Regiment, 19th Army Corps, 2nd Division, 3rd Brigade. From pa pa G. A. Empie

Tell George to eat maple sugar for me.

¹ A couple weeks earlier than Empie’s letter, B. Van Raalte of Holland, Michigan wrote that he was at Blair’s Landing. He said that he had arrived there by taking a tugboat up the Broad River about 25 miles to the landing. He said the convalescent camp was called Camp Blair’s Landing because “Blair landed here first with his troops.” At that time there were about six to seven thousand men there—all convalescents for Sherman only.