Elizabeth "Eliza" George | |
|---|---|
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| Birth name | Elizabeth Hamilton |
| Nickname(s) | "Mother George" |
| Born | October 20, 1808 Bridport, Vermont, US |
| Died | May 9, 1865 (aged 56) Wilmington, North Carolina, US |
| Buried | |
| Years of service | 1863–65 |
| Spouse(s) | Woodbridge C. George |
Elizabeth George (October 20, 1808 – May 9, 1865), nicknamed "Mother George" by the Union army soldiers under her care, served the final two-and-a-half years of her life as a volunteer nurse in the South during the American Civil War. Initially discouraged from serving because of her age and the harsh conditions of wartime service, the fifty-four-year-old widow left her Fort Wayne, Indiana, home in February 1863 and died in May 1865 of typhoid fever, which she contracted while nursing soldiers and civilians at Wilmington, North Carolina, a month after the end of the war. George was buried with full military honors at Lindenwood Cemetery in Fort Wayne, Indiana; a monument erected near her gravesite pays tribute to her wartime service.
In 1863–64, George worked in Union army hospitals in the Western Theater of the war at Memphis, Tennessee, Corinth, Mississippi, and Pulaski, Tennessee, as well as delivering wagonloads of medical supplies and other goods to the Union hospitals and soldiers and transporting additional supplies from Indiana to Union soldiers and hospitals in the South. She also served on hospital trains that transported injured Union soldiers to Chattanooga, Tennessee, during Union General William T. Sherman's Atlanta campaign. As part of the XV Corps hospital, she nursed ill and wounded Union soldiers at field hospitals and near the front lines, including the Battle of Jonesborough (August 31–September 1, 1864), and spent the winter of 1864–65 working in hospitals at Nashville, Tennessee, during the Confederate army's unsuccessful attempt to seize the city. George's final posting in 1865, before her death at Wilmington, North Carolina, coincided with the transfer of nearly 11,000 newly freed Union prisoners-of-war from Salisbury Prison.