Frederick Plummer Sackett

[Frederick Plummer Sackett] grew up in pioneer times and, having availed himself of every opportunity to acquire knowledge, he became a teacher in the public schools of the county. He was a musician, a fife player, in Company H, 20th. Indiana Volunteer Infantry in which he had enlisted at the outbreak of the Civil War according to a document obtained from the General Services Administration, Washington, D.C. (File No. WC 606 205). According to family legend he was captured early in the war and was confined in Libby prison and at Andersonville for seven months. The family account of his capture has it that his Company was camped in southern Ohio and was eating lunch when a scout galloped into camp with a warning of the approach of Southern Raiders. Everyone mounted and rode off as fast as possible excepting Frederick who said he wasn't going to miss his beans for anyone. He continued with his lunch and was captured. While in prison he, like everyone else there, was fed very poorly—on the entrails of animals butchered for the Southern garrison and mostly on raw squash. He developed scurvy and lost all of his teeth. When released he was honorably discharged. When his health improved he again enlisted, according to "A History of Van Buren County, Michigan" by Captain O.W. Rowland, Vol. 11, in an Iowa regiment for 100 days but stayed in until the close when he was again honorably discharged.

He attended Kalamazoo College, Kalamazoo, Michigan for a time, probably after the war, and later taught school at the "Brown School", a country school near Kalamazoo, from the fall of 1866 until the spring of 1867. (The building was still standing when I last checked, about twenty years ago). Susan Earl was one of his pupils, an eighth grade student. He married Susan Earl on June 11, 1867, in Pine Grove, Michigan. He then turned to farming for a livelihood, and his farm was located at Gobles, Michigan.

He was six foot tall, rather lean and "rawboned"; "a man of good disposition, honest and never was involved in serious difficulties with anyone" according to his son, Frank Sackett. He was blue eyed and had dark brown hair. During his later years he lived on a Civil War Veteran's pension. He died October 16, 1905, at Gobles, Michigan and was buried at the Earl Family Cemetery, Pine Grove, Michigan.

— Andrew P Sackett, Ancestors and Descendants of Frederick Plummer Sackett.