Margaret Anna Pulver Smith

The Pulver family had three daughters when they were living in the town of Wayne, New York  in the Finger Lakes region. Margaret was the middle child of the three, who all grew up in Huron County, Ohio about the time Thomas Edison was born there in 1847. 

She was in her mid-20s when the nation was split by war, and at some point she committed to doing her part by being a nurse. There are no other details until she married Cyrus Talbot Smith, Jr. in 1867. Perhaps she met him as a result of the war, since he was a private in Company I of the 105th Ohio Infantry Regiment.

Cyrus had been captured in January of 1863 near Murfreesboro, Tennessee. Guessing that she nursed him back to health after his ordeal would help to romanticize the story, but there’s no evidence to support it. All that is known of their early years together is that they lived in Ashtabula, Ohio and she gave birth to three children while he tried his hand at farming.

By the mid-1870s the family had moved to Philadelphia, where they lived on Wallace Street in the Spring Garden neighborhood for nearly 30 years. City directories show he was in real estate; the 1880 census says he had a dual role as a merchant. Between the two, he did well enough to have a live-in servant to help maintain the household.

Cyrus began receiving a pension in 1888 because he had a disability related to his military service. In 1903 he built a house in the nearly-all-residential community of Aldan in suburban Delaware County, but he only had a brief time to enjoy it. Cyrus died on March 14, 1905. He left an estate worth $22,500 (or more than $800,000 in current dollars) and Margaret also began receiving a widow’s pension.

Not long afterward, she invited Clark, their oldest son, and his family to live there with her. After several years they moved out and Margaret moved to Chester County to live with her daughter’s family until she died in 1924. 

What makes her story noteworthy is that she was recognized for her service to the military, a rare recognition for a woman from the Civil War era. There were 3214 women who were paid nurses (at 40 cents per day) and countless numbers who volunteered; most had no training and many died of diseases, as had the men they treated. And none were recognized with a government pension until a law granted that right in 1892. 

However, they had to prove they had served at least six months and had been hired by someone who was authorized by the War Department to do so.  Volunteer nurses were excluded until after 1910, but they had rigorous qualifications as well. So many women had died by then and most of those who were still living couldn’t obtain the proper records or answer all the questions. 

Whether Margaret applied is unknown, but she has a Veterans Burial Record card issued by Pennsylvania’s Department of Military Affairs, and her grave is marked with a military headstone, shown above. The stones for both her and her husband as seen in this photo have since been reset, which explains the brown appearance of her marker.