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Over 50 years of research into the Stratton, Schneider, King, and allied families—from colonial Massachusetts to Indiana and beyond. Built by Bill & Karen Stratton.
Strattons of Massachusetts Bay
Running Through the Sands of Time
Jacob Gerber had learned to ration everything.
Water he rationed by the swallow. Food — when there was food — he ate in small bites, slowly, to make the body believe there was more than there was. Sleep he rationed too, though that was more complicated, because sleep brought the farm back to him, brought Indiana back, and he was greedy for Indiana in a way he could not afford to be.
He was twenty-four years old. He had been inside the stockade at Andersonville for seven months. What the stockade had taken from him he was still counting.
The shebang was four feet wide and low enough that he had to duck going in. He had built it in April from scraps of wood and a square of canvas traded from a Wisconsin man for the last of his coffee — real coffee, which had come in a package from home and which he had been saving since February. The Wisconsin man had used the canvas to patch his own shebang and was dead by June. That was the arithmetic of Andersonville. You gave something up to get something, and then both things were gone.
The thing he thought about most was bread.
Not hardtack. Not the gray cornmeal mush that the guards ladled out once a day when they felt like it. Susanna Gerber’s bread. His mother’s bread. The smell of it coming through the kitchen door of the farmhouse in Canton Township, Ohio, on a February morning when he was nine years old and the snow was deep outside and the whole Gerber family was pressing into the kitchen for breakfast — twelve of them around the table, jostling for position, his father David at the head with his hands folded and his eyes closed, waiting for them to settle before he spoke the blessing.
They never quite settled. That was the thing about the Gerbers. There were too many of them for silence.
He lay in the shebang and thought about the noise of it, and the smell of the bread, and tried not to think about how thirsty he was.
His father David had come from Pennsylvania German stock, which meant he was deliberate and thorough and not easily impressed by things that other men found impressive. His mother Susanna was a Buechtel, same stock, same quiet stubbornness dressed up in a different name. Between them they had made twelve children and a farm in Canton Township, Stark County, Ohio, and the farm was good and the children were healthy and if you had asked David Gerber in 1850 whether he had everything he needed, he would have said yes and meant it — which made it all the more surprising when, in 1855, he loaded the whole operation onto wagons and drove west.
The oldest, Elias Baron — EB to everyone, from the moment he could be abbreviated — was twenty-four that year and had already been teaching school and talking about engineering and studying maps the way other young men studied women. He had ideas about the western country. He had ideas about a great many things. He was nine years older than Jacob, and by the time Jacob was learning his letters, EB was already looking past the horizon.
The others filled the space between them. Sarah and Lydia and John and Daniel and Christian and Eliza and Abraham and Anna and Benjamin — and Jacob, who came somewhere in the middle of that list and had learned early that a boy in the middle of twelve children develops his own methods for being noticed, or else learns to be content without notice. Jacob had learned to be content. He was not dull, not slow — he could outwork any boy his age in the county and was not above letting people know it — but he did not need to be the loudest voice in the room. He had a room full of loud voices. He was comfortable on the edge of it, watching.
The one he watched most was Christiana.
She was six years younger than Jacob, which made her nine when they moved to Indiana and fourteen when he first understood that she was going to be the kind of person people paid attention to. She had their mother’s practical face and their father’s steady eyes and a capacity for silence that in a family of talkers was its own kind of power. When Christiana said something, people heard it. She did not say things idly.
Indiana was the Hawpatch — Eden Township in LaGrange County, rolling country with hawthorn trees thick on the ridges and black soil that rewarded work the way the Ohio ground had rewarded it. Jacob was fifteen when they arrived. By the time he was eighteen he knew every fence line and creek in the township, had helped EB survey two property disputes, and had decided that whatever came next in his life, it would be here.
He did not know then that here would not be where he finished.
He was twenty-one when the war came, and he did not hesitate.
That was not bravery exactly, or not only bravery. It was the particular arithmetic of a young man who had been raised to believe that a thing either mattered or it didn’t, and that if it mattered you did something about it. The Union mattered. The men who were shooting at it had to be stopped. Jacob Gerber enlisted in Company C of the 30th Indiana Volunteer Infantry in the late summer of 1861. He was one of the youngest in the company.
The night before he left, Christiana found him sitting on the porch step in the dark.
She sat down beside him without asking whether he wanted company.
“Isaac King asked after you,” she said, after a while.
Jacob looked at her. “Did he.”
She said nothing.
“He’s a good man,” Jacob said. “The Kings have been good neighbors.”
Christiana was quiet for a moment. In the dark he couldn’t see her face. “He asked if he might write to me while you’re gone.”
Jacob was silent. “What did you tell him?”
“I told him I’d think about it.”
He almost smiled. That was Christiana. Never gave anything away before she was ready. “Well,” he said. “He’s a good man.”
She put her hand over his and they sat there until the fireflies went out.
He thought about that hand for a long time afterward. In the months that followed, sitting in camps in Kentucky and Tennessee, he thought about a great many things from home — his mother’s kitchen, his father’s blessing at the table, the hawthorn trees on the LaGrange County ridges in spring — but he always came back to Christiana’s hand on his in the dark, and the thing she hadn’t quite said, and the thing he hadn’t quite said back.
He should have said it plainly. He should have said: he’s a good man and you should say yes, because you deserve someone steady and Isaac King is steady, and I want to know you’re settled before I go.
He said none of it. He was twenty-one and it didn’t occur to him that there might not be another chance.
The 30th Indiana went south and west, into the hard country of the war’s Western Theater, and Jacob went with it.
He was at Perryville in October of ’62, standing in a field of dead corn while Confederate infantry came across an open hillside, and he held the line. He was at Stones River in the frozen last days of December, firing until his ears rang permanently, and he came out of that one with all his limbs and a new understanding of what it meant when men said a battle was bad. He marched through Tennessee mud and Kentucky limestone and watched the war grind down men he’d known since the day he’d signed his name.
He wrote home as often as he could. He wrote to his mother and his father and EB and Christiana.
Christiana wrote back.
She wrote about the township — the crops, the church social, the neighbor’s barn that had gone up in a December lightning strike, the new schoolhouse EB was helping build in Ligonier. She wrote about her mother’s health and her father’s stubbornness about the east field. Once, in the fall of ’62, she wrote that Isaac King had enlisted with the 88th Indiana and was somewhere in the same general country Jacob was marching through, and that she thought about them both, and prayed for them both, and that she hoped Jacob understood what she meant by that.
Jacob understood perfectly. He wrote back: I am glad he went. I always said he was a good man. You are in good hands either way — mine to look after you until I get home, and his to look after you after. He did not know, when he wrote it, how close to the truth that would turn out to be, or how different the shape of it would become.
The letters from home were the most important thing. A man could endure a great deal if there were letters.
He held onto this longer than he should have.
The battle was in woods so thick that you could not see twenty yards in any direction, and the sound of rifle fire came from everywhere at once, which was the first sign that something was wrong.
The first day, September 19th, the 30th Indiana held. The lines bent and surged and bent again, and Jacob fired until his hands were black with powder smoke and his shoulder ached from the recoil, and when darkness came he went to sleep on the ground with the reasonable expectation that tomorrow would be hard but survivable.
The 20th was different.
No one on the Union right knew it at the time, but a gap had opened in the line — a mistake, an order misread, a division pulled out of position at exactly the wrong moment — and through that gap, at two in the afternoon, Longstreet’s corps hit like a closed fist. The right side of the Army of the Cumberland came apart. Twenty thousand Confederate soldiers poured through the hole, and regiments that had held their ground an hour before were suddenly running or captured or dying.
Jacob’s company was in the gap.
He remembered the sound first — a roar coming from the wrong direction, from behind, where there should have been Union troops. He turned and there were gray uniforms in the trees, close enough to see faces, close enough to see that some of them were not much older than he was. He fired. He reloaded. He fired again. And then the sergeant he’d known for two years was down, and the line was moving in the wrong direction, and the men in gray kept coming.
He fought until his ammunition was gone.
A hand on his collar. The ground coming up. Two Confederate soldiers hauling him to his feet. He stood there in the smoke with empty hands and understood, with a clarity that was almost peaceful, that this part of his life was over.
He was twenty-three years old. He had fought for his country for two years. He would not fire another shot.
They marched the prisoners south for weeks, through Tennessee and into Georgia, and Jacob’s boots gave out in Tennessee. A Confederate guard — a boy, really, no more than sixteen — watched him limping for half a day and then without a word tore a strip from a worn-out blanket and handed it over. Jacob wrapped his feet and thanked the boy. The boy looked away, embarrassed.
There were stops along the way — warehouses and tobacco barns pressed into service as prisons — and then in February 1864, when a new camp opened in southwest Georgia, Jacob was among the men transferred south.
The first thing you noticed was the smell.
The second thing was the deadline: a low wooden rail running parallel to the stockade walls about nineteen feet inside them. Any prisoner who crossed the deadline would be shot without warning. Men had been shot reaching over it to retrieve a hat the wind had taken. Men had been shot in their sleep, when they rolled too close in the dark.
The third thing — the thing Jacob kept coming back to, the thing he had not expected — was the sound of thirty thousand men in a space built for ten thousand. Not chaos, exactly. Something lower and steadier than chaos. A sound like weather.
He found men from Ohio willing to share a shebang and pooled what he had with theirs. There was a corporal among them named Willis Sutter, from Portage County, Ohio, who had been there since the camp opened and was still upright through a combination of stubbornness and whatever in a man’s constitution it took to still be standing at Andersonville by the time summer came. Willis taught Jacob the rhythms of survival: the ration line, the water situation, which guards were human and which were not, how to make cornmeal you couldn’t cook stretch as far as cornmeal could go.
“You learn it or you don’t,” Willis said. “And the ones who don’t, you bury.”
He was not wrong. By June, two of the four men in their shebang were in the ground outside the walls.
The stream that ran through the stockade — Stockade Branch, the men called it — had been sewage since May.
Men who drank from it in the early weeks paid for it with fever and dysentery and worse. By summer, only men with no other options touched it. The rest found other ways, traded for water, or simply went without in a Georgia August that was not the kind of summer that forgave going without.
On a morning in early August, a thunderstorm came through the camp, and when it passed, something had changed. A spring had broken through the ground near the south end of the stockade — clean water, cold from the earth, welling up where no water had been before. The men who saw it first stood there in the mud and stared. Then word moved through the camp the way word always moved, sideways through gaps in the crowd, man to man, until men who could still walk were making their way south.
The prisoners called it Providence Spring.
Jacob went to it with Willis. He knelt in the Georgia mud and cupped his hands and drank clean cold water for the first time in four months. The taste of it — the pure, cold taste of water that had not passed through anything human — undid him in a way that the worst of the stockade had not managed to do.
He wept. He was not ashamed of it. Half the men around him were weeping.
Willis knelt beside him. “Providence,” Willis said.
“Providence,” Jacob agreed.
He thought of the well in the yard of the Stark County farmhouse, where the water was so cold in summer it made your teeth ache. He thought of carrying the bucket in from the well on a hot Ohio afternoon, the way the cold sloshed against the sides, the way you drank straight from the dipper before you even got inside.
He thought: I am going to drink from that well again.
Willis died on a Thursday in late August.
Jacob did not know the exact date. He knew it was a Thursday because the guards changed on Thursdays. Willis had been feverish for four days, and one morning Jacob woke in the shebang and Willis was not breathing.
Jacob sat with him for a while. He said the Lord’s Prayer, which Susanna Gerber had drilled into all her children with the same thoroughness she brought to bread-making and account-keeping. Then he called for the dead wagon.
He was alone in the shebang after that.
He stopped writing home in July — not because he had nothing to say, but because the effort of sitting upright, of concentrating, of forming letters that looked like letters, had become more than his hands could reliably manage. He thought about Christiana instead. He thought about the porch in the dark, the night before he left. He thought about her hand on his.
He thought: When I get home I will say it plainly. I will say — I should have told you to say yes to him before I went. Say yes to Isaac King and be happy. I will say it and she will laugh at me for being an idiot about it, and we will sit on the porch and she will tell me everything that happened while I was gone, and I will listen to all of it.
He thought: I just have to last a little longer.
The rumors started in the first days of September.
Information moved through the stockade the way it always moved — sideways, through gaps, in whispers passed from the men who worked outside the walls to the men confined within. Someone had heard something from a guard. Someone had seen a newspaper being carried. The word that moved through the camp on the evening of September 2nd, 1864, was a single word, passed from man to man in the gathering dark.
Atlanta.
Sherman had taken Atlanta.
Jacob heard it from the man in the next shebang, a Pennsylvania cavalryman who said it the way men say things they are afraid to believe. Jacob lay still and let it move through him.
Atlanta meant the end. Everyone in the stockade understood that. If Sherman held Atlanta, Lincoln won the election, the war went on until the Union won it outright, and the Confederacy was running out of time and men and everything else. Atlanta might mean the prisoner exchange would shift. Atlanta might mean the Southern will to keep thirty thousand men in a stockade might be reconsidered.
Atlanta meant home.
Around him, in the dark, men were saying it quietly to each other. Some wept. Some prayed aloud. Some were too far gone to make it mean anything.
Jacob lay on his back in the shebang and looked up at the Georgia sky through the gap in the canvas where the corner had pulled loose, and he thought about the Hawpatch. The hawthorn trees in the fall. The smell of the farm. His father’s hands folded at the head of the table, waiting for twelve children to settle.
He thought about Christiana standing at some kitchen window in LaGrange County, not knowing where he was, not knowing if Isaac was alive, waiting for two men she loved and knowing she might not get either one back. He thought: she is going to be so glad.
He thought: I just have to last until morning.
He did not last until morning.
Jacob J. Gerber died on September 3rd, 1864.
He was twenty-four years old. He had been a prisoner of the Confederate States for nearly a year. He had survived Perryville and Stones River and Chickamauga and seven months at Andersonville and Providence Spring and the death of everyone he knew inside the walls, and he died the day after Atlanta fell — one day before the news of it would have meant something to him that he could carry.
He was given a numbered stake at the head of a row in the cemetery outside the stockade walls.
A prisoner named Dorence Atwater, who had been assigned to keep the death records and had been secretly copying them into a list he hid in the lining of his coat, wrote Jacob’s name down. He would carry that list home after the war and give it to Clara Barton, and Barton would use it to notify the families of the thirteen thousand men who had died in that Georgia ground.
Jacob’s number was 9731.
The letter came to LaGrange County in November.
Christiana Gerber was in the kitchen when her mother brought it in. She looked at the return address. She had known for months — the letters had stopped in July, and Jacob was not the kind of man who stopped writing unless something had stopped him. The things that stopped soldiers from writing were a short list, and she had been moving through it since August, one entry at a time, postponing the last one.
She sat down at the table and opened the letter.
A clerk’s handwriting. Jacob J. Gerber, Private, Company C, 30th Indiana Volunteer Infantry. Died at Andersonville Prison, Georgia, September 3rd, 1864.
She sat with it for a long time.
Outside the window, LaGrange County went about its November business. The hawthorn trees on the ridge had gone the color of rust. A wagon moved on the road. Somewhere a dog was barking at something that didn’t matter.
She thought about the porch. She thought about his hand under hers and the thing she hadn’t said — that she loved him not only in the way of a sister but in the way that means I will carry you with me wherever I go. She thought: he knew. He always knew without being told. He was that kind of person.
She thought about a young man who had wanted to do the right thing and had done it, faithfully, for two years, and had been taken prisoner in a Georgia woods and had died in a Georgia prison the day after the war turned in the Union’s favor, one day before it would have mattered.
She folded the letter carefully and put it in her apron pocket.
Then she got up and started supper, because supper still needed to be started, and the family still needed to eat, and Jacob, who had known this about the world — that you kept going because keeping going was what you owed the people who were counting on you — would have understood.
In Ligonier, EB Gerber received his own letter the same week.
He had known something was wrong since summer. He had the habit, common to those who have sent someone off to war and are counting the weeks since the last letter, of running the arithmetic in the back of his mind even while he was doing everything else — surveying property lines, running the hardware store, attending lodge meetings, being EB.
He read the letter in the back of the store, standing among the stoves and the plow blades and the agricultural implements, and he stood there without moving for a while.
Then he walked to the front, turned the sign to CLOSED, and sat down behind the counter with his hands flat on the wood.
His little brother Jacob had gone to fight for his country and had fought for two years without complaint and had been taken prisoner and had died of starvation in a stockade in Georgia at the age of twenty-four. The war he had died in had now been won. He had missed the winning by one day.
EB was a man who built things. He understood, in the way that practical men understand it, that building was what you did in the face of what you couldn’t fix — that you kept building because the alternative was to sit in the wreckage and let it own you. He had buried a brother. He would bury another, Benjamin, seventeen years from now in a lake at Rome City, another loss that made no sense, that had no meaning he could find if he looked for it.
He sat behind his counter until the light changed in the windows.
Then he stood up, turned the sign back to OPEN, and went back to work.
There was nothing else to do that honored Jacob as much as that.
Isaac William King married Christiana Lena Gerber on November 23rd, 1866.
Isaac walked with a limp. The old axe scar on his right foot, compounded by three years of hard marching and the punishment of hauling artillery shells up Missionary Ridge under fire, had become a permanent accounting in his body. He used a cane some days. He did not complain about it.
At the wedding, EB stood up at the front of the church in his good suit, square-shouldered and steady, and did not let his face say what the day cost him — the joy of it and the grief in the joy, his sister finally settled with a good man, and the brother who should have been there to see it standing in an empty space beside them.
Before the ceremony began, Christiana stood at the back of the church for a moment.
The people who knew her knew what the moment was. She was not nervous. She was not uncertain about Isaac, had not been uncertain about Isaac for years.
She was saying goodbye to someone who was not in the room.
Then she walked forward, and the music began, and the rest of her life commenced.
Dorence Atwater’s list of the Andersonville dead was published in 1866. Jacob J. Gerber, Number 9731, Company C, 30th Indiana Volunteer Infantry, is among the names.
He is buried at Andersonville National Cemetery in Sumter County, Georgia, in a row with men from Ohio and Indiana and Michigan and Wisconsin and New York — men who believed the Union was worth the cost and who paid more than they could afford.
The grave marker is white marble now, placed by the government after the war.
It reads: J. Gerber. Co. C. 30 Ind. Inf.
That is all it says. It is enough to find him.
Author’s Note: Jacob J. Gerber (1840–1864) was born in Canton Township, Stark County, Ohio, the son of David and Susanna Buechtel Gerber. He was the brother of Elias Baron Gerber of Ligonier, Indiana, and the brother of Christiana Lena Gerber, who married Isaac William King of the 88th Indiana Volunteer Infantry in 1866. Their story is told in The Scar He Carried. Jacob enlisted in Company C of the 30th Indiana Volunteer Infantry in 1861 and served in the Western Theater until his capture at the Battle of Chickamauga in September 1863. He died at Andersonville Prison on September 3, 1864 — the day after Union forces under General Sherman occupied Atlanta, Georgia. He was twenty-four years old. Willis Sutter is a fictional character, a composite of the men who died at Andersonville. All other figures and events are drawn from the historical record. The scenes, dialogue, and interior lives are imagined. The facts are documented.
—Wm. F. Stratton, April 2026
Over 50 years of research into the Stratton, Schneider, King, and allied families—from colonial Massachusetts to Indiana and beyond. Built by Bill & Karen Stratton.
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