Pone’s War
Isaac Anderson Caldwell, ca. 1880
In January 1885, 45-year old George O. Hildebrand retired from his business as a lumber and hardware dealer in Strong City, Kansas, located between Topeka and Wichita. He and his wife Ella planned to move to Ella’s childhood hometown of Tullahoma, Tennessee where the couple had met in the midst of the Civil War.
George had been a Union soldier beginning in April 1861. A native of Logan, Ohio, he served as a Private in the 13th Ohio Infantry Regiment. His outfit fought through every major battle and many minor engagements in Tennessee and surrounding states, including Shiloh, Stones River, Chickamauga, the Chattanooga battles, the Atlanta campaign, and Sherman’s marches through Georgia and the Carolinas. As a unit in William Rosecrans’s Army of the Cumberland after the battle of Stones River in 1863, the 13th Ohio first operated in the Murfreesboro area then participated in the almost bloodless Tullahoma Campaign in June and July, when Rosecrans ran Braxton Bragg’s Army of Tennessee out of Middle Tennessee for good. The 13th Ohio fought in the Battle of Liberty Gap on the approaches to Shelbyville, then acted as a garrison unit in the Tullahoma area in July and August before proceeding east toward Chickamauga and Chattanooga. During his garrison duty, George Hildebrand met and fell in love with a local girl, Ella Marcell. After George was discharged from the army, he returned to Tennessee and he and Ella married.
In early April 1885, George Hildebrand bought an interest in a planning mill in Tullahoma. He, his wife, son Elmer and daughter Kate left Strong City for Tullahoma in mid-April. Upon arriving in Tullahoma the Hildebrands commissioned a local homebuilder, 46-year old Isaac Anderson Caldwell, to construct their new house.
Isaac Caldwell, known to everybody as “Pone”, had been a Confederate soldier beginning in April 1861. A native of Franklin County just east of Tullahoma, in 1860 he was working as an apprentice carpenter in the county seat, Winchester. As the secession crisis deepened in late 1860 and early 1861, he joined Peter Turney’s nascent militia, later the 1st Tennessee Infantry Regiment. In this unit he served as a Private, later Corporal, and a regimental sharpshooter. The 1st Tennessee marched off from Winchester to the railhead at Decherd on May 1, 1861, and boarded a train for Virginia. There they fought through every major battle after First Manassas, and many minor engagements, in Virginia, Maryland, and Pennsylvania. Pone Caldwell was captured three times – after Second Manassas, after Gettysburg, and in the last week of the war when Union forces finally overran the Confederate defenses at Petersburg – and wounded once, at Gettysburg. After the war he married his prewar sweetheart Mary Caroline “Mollie” Turner. In 1885 the Caldwells had six children ranging in age from 15 to 5 – son Tom and daughters Maude, Nora, Lucy, Clara, and Georgia – and Mollie was expecting another baby.
At about 3 in the afternoon of Tuesday, July 21 1885, Pone Caldwell was working on George Hildebrand’s new house. According to the account in the local newspaper, he “… fell from a scaffold about twelve feet from the ground, striking on his head and shoulders. Those who saw the fall did not think he was seriously hurt, as, with the assistance of two friends, he walked to his home …” but the fall apparently ruptured a blood vessel inside his skull. The newspaper continued, “… on reaching there he became unconscious and began sinking rapidly. He lingered until a few minutes after 7 o’clock … then breathed his last.” The article describing the accident concluded with a tribute, “Mr. Caldwell has been a resident of Tullahoma for many years, where he has worked at his trade as a carpenter. He had many warm friends. He was a good husband and father, and his death is a sad blow to his wife and little children, to whom we, in conjunction with all our citizens, tender our heartfelt sympathy.”
The irony of this accident is inescapable. A Union veteran and a Confederate veteran, both common soldiers, met 20 years after the end of the Civil War and made a routine business arrangement – construction of a house. Both had suffered the hardships of campaigning, the boredom of camp life, and the dangers of combat, and both had scars to show for it. Both had made good professional and family lives for themselves after the war. In the course of the job he was doing for George Hildebrand – one he had done safely many times – and after surviving four years of war, Pone Caldwell was killed in a freak mishap. Two months after his death his last child was born, a son named Isaac Anderson Jr. – who was called “Pone” for his whole life.
For their part, the Hildebrands soon moved back to Kansas where Ella died in 1888. George became increasingly disabled and moved into an old soldiers’ home in 1892, where he died in 1896 from a strangulated hernia – the hernia suffered in Columbia, Tennessee in 1862, in the course of his army duties.
