Incident at the close of the Civil War

Springfield Monthly Meeting never closed its doors during the Civil War. Meeting was held regardless of conditions. When the war closed, troops of ragged, war-worn soldiers were struggling to get home, some with worn out horses and more walking.

Often civilians driving good, well fed horses were halted by these confeds (soldiers) and were demanded to give over their horses, and sometimes would take the good horses and leave their weak ones, that were scarcely able to travel. This was very distasteful to the owners of good horses.

On one occasion, Enos T. Blair was bringing members John & Elizabeth Blair to midweek at Springfield. He had two fine well kept horses hitched to a wagon with members sitting in chairs in the wagon. Every thing was going well, until a group of confeds halted the wagon near Bloomington, took the horses and left two poor ones that were scarcely able to travel. Enos was quite exasperated, but Lizzie his younger sister was so overcome with sympathy for the ragged & emaciated men that she fed away the reticule of cookies she had brought to sustain her through the long meeting.

Enos, her brother, reprimanded her for feeding them her cookies when they were robbing them of their good horses, but his young sister said, “But they look so sad and ragged and hungry. I wanted them to have my cookies.”

from the archives of the Springfield Memorial Association

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