MANSFIELD, Oh. (EYT) — A historical question with no good answers led a Venango County man on a two-decade journey to understand a Civil War mystery.
(Pictured above: Bret Schweinfurth guards a replica of President Lincoln’s coffin in Elizabethtown, PA. Photos provided by Bret Schweinfurth.)
Bret Schweinfurth said he grew up a historian. His family was into Civil War reenactments, and he said he became a reenactor at seven. He started collecting Civil War relics at 14, and two years later, got a relic from something called “the Invalid Corps.” History books were silent on the corps, so Schweinfurth went to his Civil War sources. He found their answers unsatisfying.
“My sources told me that they were from soldiers who were disabled and used during the war,” Schweinfurth explained. “They said they had no real information on them. For 150 years, no one had a solid answer about who the Invalid Corps really was.”
That piece of history started Schweinfurth digging through libraries and talking to experts. He found that the Invalid Corps started during the Revolutionary War, but there were only around 20 members and they worked as guards. Then, the Civil War came, and the corps membership swelled.
“If you knew the history of the time, two years into the war, the North was losing!” Schweinfurth said. “The North was desperate to access men. That’s when they really enforced the draft and started the United States Colored Troops. Then, they found these people in the hospital who could still serve. Those men were moved to other positions and freed up other men for combat duty.”