From the July 3, 2021, Minneapolis Star Tribune "Minnesota Historical Society looks to the future" by Jennifer Brooks.
I wrote about the shirt that may have saved Henry Mills' life at the Battle of Nashville in 1864 earlier this month. It is now housed in the collections of the Minnesota Historical Society. Here is some more information on it.
Henry Mills held on to the shirt that saved his live for the rest of his long life.
It was a dead man's shirt. Likely taken off a dead Confederate soldier on the icy Battle of Nashville on a bitter day in December 1864. Mills took the shirt and wrapped it tightly around the bleeding bullet wound in his leg.
He ended up losing the leg, but kept the shirt. After the war, it came home with him to Minnesota -- first to Fort Snelling, where Lt. Henry Mills mustered out of the 7th Minnesota Volunteer Infantry, then to his home in St. Paul.
No matter how many times the Mills family washed that shirt, the blood stains would not come out. But, instead of burning it or cutting it into strips for rags so he wouldn't be reminded of its story, Mills carried this bit if his past into the future.
--Old Secesh
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