The Pioneer Boys of the Ohio or Clearing the Wilderness by Harrison Adams

Upon the completion of his military service Mr. Harry was on one occasion captured by the enemy and for nine months thereafter was confined in Libby Prison, the terrible deprivations he suffered there so weakening him that he had to be carried out on a stretcher when he finally was exchanged.

At the end of his initial term of enlistment he re-enlisted and served altogether as a soldier of the Union for four years and ten months, during the most of which time his command was attached to the Army of the Potomac. When President Lincoln's first call for seventy-five thousand volunteers to put down the Southern rebellion was made, John Harry responded to the same and enlisted as a private in Company C, Sixteenth Regiment, Indiana Volunteer Infantry. He then went to Franklin county, this state, and there married Catherine Spears, who also was born in Virginia and who had come into this state, by way of Kentucky, with her parents, the family settling in Franklin county. John Harry was but a lad when his parents, Allan Harry and wife, moved from Virginia to Kentucky, shortly afterward coming on up into Indiana and locating in Grant county, where John Harry's boyhood and young manhood were spent.

His widow later remarried and is still living, now a resident of the adjoining county of Wayne. He was born on a farm in Jackson township, not far from the place on which he now resides, August 7, 1867, son of John and Catherine (Spears) Harry, natives of Virginia and the former of whom was an honored veteran of the Civil War, whose last days were spent in this county, his death occurring when his son, the subject of this sketch was four years of age. William Thomas Harry, one of Jackson township's well-known farmers and a veteran of the Spanish-American War, is a native son of Fayette county and has lived here nearly all his life.

The Pioneer Boys of the Ohio or Clearing the Wilderness by Harrison Adams