James Groat:
Son, Soldier, and now…The subject of Fan Fiction
ACHS staff spent time with the Creative Writing 2 students in Anoka to look between the lines of Groat's diary and see the often unnamed characters. These students learned about Groat, researched his time in history, then imagined who he would have interacted with. They created a name, a character sketch, and a story about this person—click the button below to read their work! The students also interviewed each other about their writing experiences, sometimes from the author's viewpoint and sometimes from the characters. You can hear the highlights of those conversations in our podcast episode, coming soon!
James W. Groat is the great-grandson of John Groat, an immigrant to the United States from Germany in the 1700s, who eventually settled in upstate New York. The Groat family remained in that area, with each generation moving further away. When James was four, his parents moved the family to Oneida Lake in Oswego County, New York. He married and had his own children by 1854, when he took his family west, landing first in North Prairie, Wisconsin. None of the land in Wisconsin suited him, so the family pressed on to St. Paul, where his wife Rebecca waited with their children while Groat headed north. He reached Anoka in October and found that “the place suited me better than any section of the country I had struck in the west.”[1] Rebecca and the children joined him on October 17, 1854, and Anoka became the Groat family’s home.
First, a little history to set the scene…
Groat immediately became involved with life in Anoka. A carpenter by trade, he took a job building the first hotel put up in Anoka, which Silas Farnham owned.[2] Shortly after that, Groat and a few other men formed a company to run a ferry between Anoka and Champlin across the Mississippi since there was no bridge or ferry before that time.[3] Groat built the ferry boat itself for this venture.[4]
Another traveler, Aurora Giddings, arrived in Anoka around the same time as Groat and did us a favor by describing what he (and Groat) would have seen in town:
“the city is only of three months growth … [it] was owned and laid out by a company from Maine every though men who have laid out forty thousand dollars erecting saw and grist mills planning machine lath factory etc. Now we have two public houses one larger and furnished as well as any … the other accommodates 15 boarders & two families of six each. The land lady is a half breed, one boarding house, 16 dwelling houses, one stair all in the short space of three months, there is about three families in each house, this is pioneering move the families onto the ground and build the house around them as lumber can be procured…”
Groat’s wandering tendencies did not cease immediately when he arrived in Anoka. He tried farming in a few places around Anoka before finally building a house on Slaughter and Creighton’s Addition in 1857.[5] The family lived happily together for several years, but the 1860 election of Abraham Lincoln increased tensions between the North and the South. Groat was not surprised by the outbreak of hostilities in April 1861, and was one of the first of the Anoka volunteers.[6] Having volunteered to fight for the Union, Groat began three years of journeying which took him far from home.
He was one of many from Anoka County. If you count all the men aged 18-45, you’ll find 320 living here—309 of them served in the Civil War. That’s 97%. And that doesn’t include those medically excused; when loading his gun, Rufus Downs was refused because he didn’t have enough teeth to rip off the ends of paper cartridges.
The journey began on foot, with the volunteers marching down to Fort Snelling and joining Company C of the First Minnesota.[7] The First Minnesota Volunteer Infantry Regiment mustered for duty on April 28, 1861; they were the first troops raised by Minnesota for Civil War service and one of the first regiments anywhere in the Union to enter national service (they were in Washington D.C. by July 4th, 1861).[8]
Initially given orders to relieve another regiment at Fort Ripley near Little Falls, the men walked as far as Sauk Rapids before a messenger arrived to order them back to Fort Snelling: they were being sent to Washington and the front. That journey was primarily accomplished by boat and train, aside from a brief march through Baltimore, Maryland, which was not friendly to the Union. While a previous regiment had been met with violence, First Minnesota was treated respectfully; Groat reports that “The only hostile demonstration that we encountered was that of a lady leaning over the balcony above us on one of the streets with a miniature rebel flag projecting from her bosom.”[9]
While serving with First Minnesota, Groat had many exciting stories. At the Battle of Balls Bluff in October of 1861 in Virginia, they were not allowed to assist fellow Union soldiers, which made Groat angry (he refers to the battle as a “slaughter” and considered General Stone to be a “rank traitor”), but continued to hold a picket line along the north bank of the Potomac River throughout the winter of 1861-1862.[10]
“The eighteen months that I served with the U.S. Engineers were full of adventure and danger which just suited me...I was slightly wounded three times, and suffered sickness nigh unto death many times, was in seventeen pitched battles and many skirmishes, but have never regretted my service to my country.”
In conclusion…
We are fortunate to have transcriptions of Groat’s memoir, which he wrote in 1889, based on diaries he kept for the previous 30 years, including his time in service. This memoir tells us about the details of his experience and travels during the war.
In the 1980s, the Anoka County Historical Society published this memoir under the title “Pages Clothed in the Plainest of Dress,” after a phrase that Groat uses in his preface to the memoir. Groat passed away in 1895 at 70, just a few weeks shy of his 71st birthday. His wife, three of his sons, and grandchildren survived him.
Starting from Washington D.C. in 1861, Groat recounts stopping at least overnight at approximately 81 locations throughout his service. Within this number are 55 unique places, including towns, fords, and a few railroad stations, but do not consider each battlefield. Much of this distance was traveled on foot, mentioning only one trip by a “steamer” boat and one by train; his trip to visit his family in New York was also (presumably) done mainly by rail.
The Groat family stayed and worked in New York for four years before returning to Minnesota on August 14, 1868. Groat continued to travel around Minnesota but built a larger house on his land in Anoka, which remained the family’s primary home. His sons also traveled far afield, including Canada and the West Coast. In 1887, James and Rebecca took a trip to Oregon to visit one of their sons but returned home just a couple of months later when another son lost his wife unexpectedly. They remained in Anoka for the rest of their lives.
Love this story? It’s part of a program called, “The Journeys We Take.” Book it now for your social group, church, school, or book club!
Bibliography
[1] Pages Clothed In The Plainest of Dress, pg. 6 [2] Pages Clothed, pg. 7 [3] Ibid. [4] Ibid. [5] Ibid. [6] Pages Clothed, pg. 9 [7] Image ref: By Painting by Don Troiani. Courtesy of The National Guard - https://www.flickr.com/photos/thenationalguard/4101092782, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=21062671 [8] http://www.mnopedia.org/group/first-minnesota-volunteer-infantry-regiment [9] Pages Clothed, pg. 10 [10] Pages Clothed, pg. 16 [11] Pages Clothed, pgs. 16-17 [12] Pages Clothed, pg. 17 [13] Ibid. [14] Pages Clothed, pg. 19 [15] Pages Clothed, pg. 21 [16] Ibid. [17] Pages Clothed, pg. 22 [18] Ibid. [19] U.S. Engineers, Company A: http://www.usengineerbn.net/history.html [20] Pages Clothed, pg. 30. He later met and reconciled with said Captain, who was later killed at Gettysburg. [21] Pages Clothed, pg. 32 [22] Pages Clothed, pg. 33 [23] Ibid. [24] Ibid. [25] Ibid. [26] Pages Clothed, pg. 34 [27] Ibid. [28] Pages Clothed, somewhere, we promise [29] Pages Clothed, pg. 36 [30] Ibid. [31] Ibid. [32] Ibid. [33] Ibid. [34] Ibid. [35] Pages Clothed, pgs. 36-37 [36] Pages Clothed, pg. 42 [37] Ibid. [38] Ibid. [39] Photo credit: By Fawx, Edgar Guy [1] - Library of Congress, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=37902213 [40] Pages Clothed, pg. 43 [41] Pages Clothed, pg. 44 [42] Ibid. [43] Pages Clothed, pgs. 43-44 [44] Pages Clothed, pg. 44