From:  Woman's Work in the Civil War, by L.P. Brockett & Mrs. Mary C. Vaughan, Philadelphia 1867, pp. 279-283

Mrs. Almira Fales

Mrs. Fales it is believed, was the first woman in America who performed any work directly tending to the aid and comfort of the soldiers of the nation in the late war.  In truth, her labors commenced before any overt sets of hostility had taken place, even so long before as December, 1860.  Hostility enough there undoubtedly was in feeling, but the fires of secession as yet only smouldered, not bursting into the lurid flames of war until the following spring.

Yet Mrs. Fales, from her home in Washington, was keen observer of the "signs of the times," and read aright the portents of rebellion.  In her position, unobserved herself, she saw and heard much, which probably would have remained unseen and unheard by loyal eyes and ears, had the haughty conspirators against the nation's life dreamed of any danger arising from the knowledge of their projects, obtained by this humble woman.

So keen was the presence founded on these things that, as has been said, she, as early as December, 1860, scarcely a month after the election of Abraham Lincoln, gave a pretext for secession which the leaders were eager to avail themselves of, "began to prepare lint and hospital stores for the soldiers of the Union, not one of whom had been called to take up arms."

Of course, she was derided for this set.  Inured to peace, seemingly more eager for the opening of new territory, the spread of commerce, the gain of wealth and power than even for the highest national honor, the North would not believe in the possibility of war until the boom of the guns of Sumter, reverberating from the waves of the broad Atlantic, and waking the echoes all along its shores, burst upon their ears to tell in awful tones that it had indeed commenced.

But there was one -- a woman n humble life, yet of wonderful benevolence, of indomiitable energy, unflagging perseverance, and unwavering purpose, who foresaw its inevitable coming and was prepared for it.

Almira Fales was no longer young.  She had spent  life in doing good, and was ready to commence another.  Her husband had employment under the government in some department of the civil service, her sons entered the army, and she, too -- a soldier, in one sense, as truly as they -- since she helped and cheered on the fight.

From that December day that commenced the work, until long after the war closed, she gave herself to it, heart and soul -- mind and body.  No one, perhaps, can tell her story of work and hardship in detail, not even herself, for she acts rather than talks or writes.  "Such women, always doing, never think of pausing to tell their own stories, which, indeed, can never be told; yet the hint of them can be given, to stir in the hearts of other women a purer emulation, and to prove to them that the surest way to happiness is to serve others and forget yourself."

In detail we have only this brief record of what she has done, yet what volumes it contains, what a history of labor and self-sacrifice!

"After a life spent in benevolence, it was December, 1860, that Almira Fales began to prepare lint and hospital stores for the soldiers of the Union, not one of whom had been called to take up arms.  People laughed, of course; thought it a 'freak;' said that none of these things would ever be needed.  Just as the venerable Dr. Mott said, at the women's meeting in Cooper Institute, after Sumter had been fired: 'Go on, ladies!  Get your lint ready, if it will do your dear hearts any good, though I don't believe myself that it will ever be needed.'  Since that December Mrs. Fales has emptied over seven thousand boxes of hospital stores, and distributed with her own hands over one hundred and fifty thousand dollars worth of comforts to sick and wounded soldiers.  Besides, she supplied personally between sixty and seventy forts with reading matter.  She was months at sea -- the only woman on hospital ships nursing the wounded and dying men.  She was at Corinth, and at Pittsburg Landing, serving our men in storm and darkness.  She was at Fair Oaks.  She was under fire through the seven days' fight on the Peninsula, with almost breaking heart ministering on those bloody fields to 'the saddest creatures that she ever saw.'

"Through all those years, every day, she gave her life, her strength, her nursing, her mother-love to our soldiers.  For her to be a soldier's nurse meant something very different from wearing a white apron, a white cap, sitting by a moaning soldier's bed, looking pretty.  It meant days and nights of untiring toil; it meant the lowliest office, the most menial service; it meant the renouncing of all personal comfort, the sharing of her last possession with the soldier of her country; it meant patience, and watching, and unalterable love.  A mother, every boy who fought for his country was her boy; and if she had nursed him in infancy, she would not have cared for him with tenderer care.  Journey after journey this woman has performed to every part of the land, carrying with her some wounded, convalescing soldier, bearing him to some strange cottage that she never saw before, to the pale, weeping woman within, saying to her with smiling face, 'I have brought back your boy.  Wipe your eyes, and take care of him.'  then, with a fantastic motion, tripping away as if she were not tired at all, and had done nothing more than run across the street.  Thousands of heroes on earth and in heaven gratefully remember the woman's loving care to them in the extremity of anguish.  The war ended, her work does not cease.  Every day you may find her, with heavy-laden basket, in hovels of white and black, which dainty and delicate ladies would not dare to enter.  No wounds are so loathsome, no disease so contagious, no human being so abject, that she shrinks from contact; if she can minister to their necessity."

During the Peninsular campaign Mrs. Fales was engaged on board the Hospital Transports, during most of the trying season of 1862.  She was at Harrison's Landing in care of the wounded and wearied men worn down by the incessant battles and hard marches which attended the "change of base" from the Chickahominy to the James.  She spent a considerable time in the hospitals at Fortress Monroe; and was active in her ministrations upon the fields in the battles of Centreville, Chantilly, and the second battle of Bull Run, indeed most of those of Pope's campaign in Virginia in the autumn of 1862.

At the battle of Chancellorsville, or rather at the assault upon Mayre's Heights, in that fierce assault of Sedgewick's gallant Sixth Corps on the works which had on the preceding December defiled the repeated charges of Burnside's best troops, Mrs. Fales lost a son.  About one-third of the attacking force were killed or badly wounded in the assault, and among the rest the son of this devoted mother, who at that very hour might have been ministering to the wounded and dying son of some other mother.  This loss was to her but a stimulus to further efforts and sacrifices.  She mourned as deeply as any mother, but not as selfishly, as some might have done.  In this, as in all her ways of life, she but carried out its ruling principle which was self-devotion, and deed not words.

Mrs. Fales may not, perhaps, be held up as an example of harmonious development, but she has surely shown herself great in self-forgetfulness and heroic devotion to the cause of her country.  In person she is tall, plain in dress, and with few of the fashionable and stereotyped graces of manner.  No longer young, her face still bears ample traces of former beauty, and her large blue eyes still beam with clear brightness of youth.  But her hands tell the story of hardship and sacrifice.

"Poor hands! darkened and hardened by work, they never shirked any task, never turned from any drudgery, that could lighten the load of another.  Dear hands! how many bloodstained faces they have washed, how many wounds they have bound up, how many eyes they have closed in dying, how many bodies they have sadly yielded to the darkness of death!"

She is full of a quaint humor, and in all her visits to hospitals her aim seemed to be to awake smiles, and arouse the cheerfulness of the patients; and she was generally successful in this, being everywhere a great favorite.  One more quotation from the written testimony of a lady who knew her well and we have done.

"An electric temperament, a nervous organization, with a brain crowded with a variety of memories and incidents that could only come up to one in a million -- all combine to give her a pleasant abruptness of motion and of speech, which I have heard some very fine ladies term insanity.  'Now don't you think she is crazy, to spend all her time in such ways?' said one.  When we remember how rare a thing utter unselfishness and self-forgetfulness is, we must conclude that she is crazy.  If the listless and idle lives which we live ourselves are perfectly sane, then Almira Fales must be the maddest of mortals.  But would it not be better for the world, and for us all, if we were each of us a little crazier in the same direction?"