Sophronia Smith Hunt

Content sourced from Wikipedia, licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.

Sophronia Smith Hunt was born Sophronia Allen in October 1846, probably in Illinois. She had little schooling and married James Andrew Jackson Smith in September 1863. In January 1864 she secretly joined the Union Army, disguising herself as a man and enlisting with her husband in Company C of the 29th Iowa Infantry. About a month later she was discovered but was allowed to stay on as a battlefield nurse. The regiment fought at Jenkins’ Ferry in April 1864, where her husband was wounded, lost a leg, and died as a prisoner of war. Sophronia left the army unharmed.

After the war she married John Hunt, another Iowa veteran, and they had eight children, though only one survived Sophronia. She died on August 1, 1928, in Sioux City, Iowa, at age 81. Her headstone, installed 88 years after her death, calls her a Civil War veteran. Local historians later learned of her story from old newspapers and pursued recognition for her, noting that she wore men’s clothes and carried a gun during the fighting.