The Delaware History Portal: Keep it Civil - Episode 1

"The Farmer and the Poet: A Story of a Lost Arm, a Found Leg and Delaware in the Civil War."

To see some images associated with the story, watch the podcast on our YouTube channel at https://youtu.be/PhqyNOiC6gs. 

Imagine being one person in a party of 23,000. If you lived in Delaware County in 1860, this was your exact situation. These days you’d be one person in a party of ten times that (or 209,000). Now imagine being one in a literal million. If you survived the first three years of the Civil War, this was about the size of the Union army by the time Lee surrendered to Grant at Appomattox. This is the story of a man (kid?) who was all of these things: a resident of Delaware Ohio in 1860, one of a million Union soldiers, and one of the approximately 620,000 who unfortunately wouldn’t make it back home. But this is also the story of America’s most famous poet, the south’s most famous missing limb, and a love affair that lasted a lifetime. Meet Oscar H. Cunningham.