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[600] New York, and never failed to minister to their comfort at the Soldiers' Rest, where they tarried during their stay in the city. She was a constant attendant and nurse at the hospitals at Bedloe's Island, and also at the large general hospital at David's Island. A large proportion of the supplies from Berkshire County, Mass., found their way to these hospitals, and came under the supervision of Mrs. Davis; and in her graphic letters to the county papers she never tired of expatiating on their abundance and excellence.

Miss Mary Dwight Pettes was born in Boston, and was a member of a family noted for generations for intelligence and religious and moral excellence. She chose to enter hospital service in St. Louis, rather than in the east, because the work there was severer and less attractive, and few experienced and trained women had then entered that field. We know little of her life in those western hospitals, save what she revealed in her letters to the ‘Boston Transcript.’ She assisted in the care of the horribly mutilated and frozen soldiers who were brought from the battlefield of Fort Donelson. She was in the hospitals into which the most severely wounded were brought from the Golgothas of Pittsburg Landing and Pea Ridge. Wherever the need was greatest and the relief work required heroic endurance, there Miss Pettes was found, patient, untiring, forgetful of herself, a benediction and an everpresent help.

‘I have never known what human suffering is,’ she wrote, while caring for the wounded and frozen soldiers of Fort Donelson; ‘I have never known what capacities for anguish were enwrapped in the human body, until the victims of the battles of Fort Donelson, Pittsburg Landing and Pea Ridge were placed under my care. What a condensation of horrors is contained in that one word “war” !’ She ministered to others at the cost of her own life. Worn down with work among these dreadful sufferers, breathing steadily the infected air of the tainted wards, she was smitten with typhoid fever, and in the early part of the year 1863 she sank into the arms of death, with words of consolation and sympathy to her patients upon her lips, among whom she fancied herself occupied. Rev. Dr. Eliot of St. Louis sent to the Christian Register of Boston, in May, 1863, a beautiful tribute to this noble Boston girl, who, as he truly said, ‘had died a martyr to the cause of country and liberty quite as much as any of those who fell on the field of battle.’

Lack of space forbids mention of many Massachusetts women whose patriotic record during the war was that of unflinching self-sacrifice and active devotion to the men who were fighting to maintain an intact and undivided republic.

Mrs. Curtis T. Fenn of Pittsfield, Mass., was a leader in Berkshire County, where the women looked to her as their head and worked under her direction. During the war nearly $10,000 worth of supplies from her native county passed directly through her hands to New York, to be used in the hospitals there or forwarded to Washington. She established a resting-place for the weary soldiers passing to and fro through Pittsfield; and when they came in large numbers, she arranged that the women who worked with her should be called to her assistance by the firing of a gun just before the transport train arrived. Then the soldiers were abundantly fed, their knapsacks were packed with food and their canteens filled with milk, tea or coffee; when, refreshed and cheered, they continued their journey.

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