The Career and Civil War Service of Robert H. Avery
Andersonville,
the notorious Confederate prison camp, broke a lot of men and killed far too
many others. How some men coped with the
hunger and the brutal conditions that wore a man down both physically and
mentally makes for interesting reading.
Robert Avery’s survival and subsequent career is a testament to his
determination, ingenuity and triumph of the human spirit.
Robert Avery’s
parents (George Avery and Saraphina Princess Mary Phelps) were among the brave
pioneers that accompanied Reverend George Washington Gale from New York to
Illinois in 1836. They were among the
second group of settlers that the Reverend brought to Galesburg. These settlers resided first in the
appropriately named “Log City,” in Knox County, but soon went on to be
instrumental in founding the city of Galesburg and Knox College. The two young adults mentioned above that
come with their families to the Illinois prairie soon found that proximity
eventually led to attraction, then love.
The couple married in Knoxville in January of 1939. The first of their seven children, Robert,
was born a year later in 1840.
Young Robert
began to attend the Academy of Knox College (high school) in 1854, but chose
not to go on to Knox College when he graduated in 1859. Instead he chose to teach school. He might have gone on to college eventually,
but the Civil War broke out. Robert followed
the news passively for some time, but eventually he felt the urge to take part
in the struggle to save the Union, and he enlisted in August of 1862, giving
Galesburg as his place of residence. He
was assigned to Company A of the 77th Illinois Infantry. The regiment camped in Peoria until October 4th,
when they were shipped to Covington, Kentucky.
From there they were moved by steamboat to Memphis where they remained
until mid-December. They were sent
further downriver, and Robert and his regiment participated in the Battle of
Milliken’s Bend, in Louisiana, then in the siege and capture of Vicksburg,
Arkansas Post, Jackson and Shreveport.
In April of 1863,
Robert Avery was promoted to the rank of Corporal. In July of that year he became a partner in a
farm of 160 acres in Knox County; this 24 year old young man was wise enough to
be looking to his future. On May 7th
of 1864 he earned his Sergeant’s stripes.
At the end of July of 1864 his regiment left Baton Rouge, Louisiana and
were disembarked on Dauphine Island, Alabama to be part of an expedition sent
to capture Mobile Bay and the forts surrounding it, an engagement best
remembered by Admiral David Glasgow Farragut’s order of “Damn the torpedoes,
full speed ahead!” after he had just witnessed one of the vessels in his fleet
fall victim to an underwater explosive. The
77th Illinois was landed on the west end of Dauphine Island. The water was so shallow near the shore that
the ships hauling their cargo of troops had to anchor some distance out, then
use skiffs to safely row the troops ashore.
Fort Powell was
the first of the forts to fall. The
rebels, finding that bombardment from the Union fleet and the advance of troops
was making their position impossible to hold, opted to retreat to Cedar Point,
a small banana-shaped island on which Fort Gaines was situated. Union forces moved forward against the fort,
which eventually fell to Union forces on August 8th.
A series of
skirmishes and movements the next couple of weeks led to counter-attacks and
fighting in the Cedar Point area and the area around the last fort to hold out;
Fort Morgan. Somehow in one of these
firefights Robert Avery was taken prisoner by the rebels. Avery was sent first to Andersonville Prison,
then to other prisons in Georgia, and finally back to Andersonville, where he
spent five and a half months of an eight-and-a-half month captivity before he
was finally released on April 18th of 1865.
Robert Avery was
lucky to have survived the horrors of the worst of the rebel prison camps. His niece, Mrs. Estelle Avery Lampe
reminisced that “many were the times when
I heard the stories of his experiences.
How he determined that ‘if any one man comes out alive, I will be that
man.’ How he never used any utensils
belonging to anyone else, and never loaned his one cup to another person, using
it not only as a dish, but for washing and bathing as well. To maintain his sanity, he occupied his mind
with planning pieces of machinery. He
would sketch plans for his mechanical inventions in the dirt, and with the
scraps of wood which he could gather within the walls of Andersonville, he
constructed the model of the corn-planter he planned to build when he would be
released.”
His daughter, Cornelia Avery Plowe,
in a letter to the editor of the Knox Alumnus also remarked on her
father’s time in that infamous prison camp.
She wrote that “He was a prisoner
at Andersonville for about 11 months. I
have the spoon that he ate his wormy beans with while in prison. The handle had been broken and he riveted on
a section of wagon tire for a handle.”
Two other sources
substantiate the above account. Avery’s
daughter Sadie describes the Andersonville survivors, including her father, as looking like” poor, gaunt skeletons,” and an 1899 county history states that “It was while being confined…that Mr. Avery,
from sheer lack of mental occupation, first directed his thoughts to those
improvements in the implements of farm work.”
Robert Avery returned to Galesburg in
1865, weak, exhausted and ill. To make
matters worse, upon his return, he immediately came down with typhoid
fever. The Avery farm was on West Main Street, and
the Cedar River, which flowed nearby, could have been the culprit. Well –water was frequently tainted by seepage
during these early years and occasionally led to outbreaks of typhoid. For a time young Robert’s very survival was
an issue, and it took him a long time to recover from the ravages of both
Andersonville and the fever.
After his recover
he went to work with his brother John Thomas on a farm in Rio, Illinois, north
of Galesburg. By January of 1867 he felt
financially secure enough and restored to health sufficiently to marry Sarah
Ayres. Soon Robert rented a farm a mile from
Galesburg and for the next 6 years he farmed and tinkered with his ideas,
working in a machine shop during the winter.
During the 1870s
Robert and his family bounced between Galesburg and Kansas as he struggled to
raise the capital to bring his ideas into practical form. Homesteading cheap
land in Kansas allowed him to accumulate some capital and credit to work on his
projects. He also entered into a
partnership with the Brown Corn-Planter Works in Galesburg. In
1878 his corn-planter patent was granted. He bought into the Frost Manufacturing Company,
which was built near the public square in Galesburg, in the hope that when the
railroad was pushed through it would come to their location. It didn’t.
This eventually left the Frost Company isolated. Outgoing shipments had to be hauled by wagon
to a location where they could be loaded upon a train.
Henry Ayres, Robert’s brother-in-law and
former Civil War comrade, urged him to relocate his growing firm to
Peoria. Eventually he did. By 1883 the Avery Agricultural Works had
built a large factory on 15 acres of ground in the upper part of the City. He also purchased 40 acres to build lodging
for his employees. This extension of
Peoria would eventually become known as Averyville.
The company
became known worldwide for their farm tractors, and their logo of a pugnacious
bulldog on their tractor’s smokehouse door became well known. After World War I, the company employed 4000
employees. Eventually, the depression
and fierce competition combined to do them in, and the
Avery Company, after a couple of bankruptcies and reorganizations, ceased to
exist shortly before World War II.
Robert H. Avery,
the guiding force behind the company, did not live to see its demise. He had promised his family that when he
became worth $10,000 he would take them on an extended tour of the West. By the time he reached that financial goal
though, he was too busy to keep his promise.
Finally, in 1892, around his 52nd birthday, he was laid low
by an illness that apparently prompted him to reflect that the time to honor
his commitment to his family was running out.
A special railroad car, The Pickwick, left Peoria on August 26th. It contained Robert and 19 other members of
his family.
Ill health, which
his family said had always clung about him because of his Andersonville ordeal,
claimed him during this vacation that was supposed to be a time of rest and
rejuvenation for him. The September 14th Los Angeles Express reported his demise
in, “The Last Journey, a Sad Finale in the Life of Robert Avery.”
“Robert Avery, a wealthy manufacturer of
Peoria, Illinois, died quite suddenly yesterday at the Westminster Hotel. He left home with his family for a pleasure
trip to California. At Salt Lake City he
was attacked by peritonitis, but kept on for this city. He arrived Saturday and rapidly grew worse,
heart failure ensuing. The remains will
be embalmed and taken back home as soon as possible by the grief-stricken
family. Mr. Avery was a maker of
agricultural implements and his income last year from a patented corn planter
was $45,000.”
Robert H. Avery is interred in
Peoria’s Historic Springdale Cemetery.
The 1899 Historical Encyclopedia of Knox County pays this tribute to him…”He was a man of rare, and thoroughly
original, inventive genius; strong in conviction, yet modest and unassuming; kindly,
generous and just. It was said of him
after his death, by one who knew him well, that ‘to have known him was an
education, while it was an honor to have been called his friend.”
Bibliography
1899 Historical Encyclopedia of Illinois, Knox County
Peoria’s Civil War Heroes peroiamagazines.com
Letter from Cornelia Avery Plowe Knox College archives
Avery Company Wikipedia article
Civil War Veterans of Knox County usgennet.org
Peoria Yesterdays by
Bill Adams, 1993
Chase the Prairie Wind, A biography of Robert H. Avery Marvin Litvin, 1975