The daring Civil War tale of Samantha Jane Atkeson of Putnam County

BUFFALO, W.Va. — Samantha Jane Atkeson was a teenager when she had to face down Union soldiers searching her home in Buffalo, West Virginia, on the Kanawha River in Putnam County.

A few torn and stained pages of her journal are preserved in the Clements Library in Ann Arbor, Michigan. They recount the story of a very eventful day in September 1861, when Union soldiers came into town.

It was fruit drying season, and Samantha's family had hired another local young woman, Susie Fry, to help with the task. When they heard the familiar sound of a steamboat pushing upstream, the girls rushed over to the river to see the familiar sight of the "Glennwood" coming up the Kanawha.

“We waved at the Pilot, who we both knew, [but] we received contempt however [so we] made three cheers for Jeff Davis.”

The pilot was now employed by the Union Army, carrying supplies up to the Federal camp upstream at Gauley, and her family supported the Confederacy. As the girls walked back to the Atkeson farm, they saw Union soldiers marching toward their home. Samantha’s father and a Dr. Brown, who lived with them, had been alerted and stole off to hide with their rifles in a nearby creek.

The bold Samantha was determined to stand in silent defiance against these unwelcome invaders.

“I stood gazing on vacantly until aroused by them passing so near me that they touched my robes, and my olfactories warned me of their close proximity by that peculiar odor emitted by very dirty men on a very warm sunny day.”

The soldiers posted guards at all the doors of her house, and then several went inside to search it.

“They were the [most] ignorant offscourings of the earth. I don’t think that more than one of them could read, and I doubt very much if any of them could make an attempt at writing. They knew literally nothing about searching a house,” she declared, and as a result, they overlooked a pistol and some ammunition that were on the floor of a dimly lit closet.

“We followed them around, keeping our eyes steadily fixed on them, which very much [disrupted] them. As they evidently had forgotten that commandment, which says 'Thou Shalt Not Steal,' they tried to evade us by going to different parts of the house at the same time, but there were indignant eyes on them, for a family of a mother and seven children, were not likely to let anything go unobserved.”

At last, Samantha devised a plan to get the soldiers out of her house. She decided to pretend that the notorious and much-feared Albert Gallatin Jenkins and his Confederate 8th Virginia Cavalry were coming to rescue them from the Union soldiers. Samantha ran to a window and began to “hallo hard for Jenkins, which I did, clapping my hands and screaming at the top of my voice."

"I looked far across the valley at one window then toward a strip of wood at another...calling on Jenkings to be quick as they were about leaving, talking to myself and some invisible power.”

The deception worked, as “the mob [of soldiers] scattered, those upstairs came tumbling down in the wildest confusion, their hair fairly raising their caps off their heads. Those around the house looked in every direction, some of them started to run and were recalled by their captain who by this time had got down two flights of stairs. We rushed madly down, taunting them with having stolen our apples and telling them that we had a lot more for Jenkins.”

A year later, on September 27th, 1862, Samantha watched from her window as Union forces skirmished with Jenkins’ troops in what came to be known as the Battle of Atkeson’s Gate. She was inspired to paint the scene, and years later, her brother Thomas Atkeson included a black-and-white image of that painting in a book he wrote about farming life along the Kanawha River.

At the war’s end, Samantha honed her painting skills at the Cincinnati Academy of Art, then returned to Putnam County, married a Confederate veteran named John Morgan, and gave birth to four children. She never gave up her passion for art, and she is listed in John Cuthbert’s "Early Art and Artists in West Virginia" as an important Kanawha Valley artist.

Samantha’s youngest son, Albert Sidney Morgan, was a gifted taxidermist, and his specimens are now part of the collections of the West Virginia State Farm Museum at the Mason County Fairgrounds. Perhaps she painted this image of an Eared Grebe from one of her son’s specimens.

The bold and talented Samantha Atkeson Morgan passed away at her home in Poca, West Virginia, in 1926 at the age of 83.

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