John W. McBay
John W. McBay died of typhoid fever while his regiment, the 131st Pennsylvania, was moving from its camps near Warrenton to Falmouth, Virginia. The Army of the Potomac was coming off of its hard fight at Antietam, in September 1862, where it had stopped the Confederate push into Maryland. It stayed in camp in that vicinity until October 30, when it moved via Harper’s Ferry to Warrenton. As cold weather and an unusually early snowstorm hit, McBay left his unit for the hospital in Frederick.
After Antietam, the men in the 131st started falling ill. Joseph Orwig, who wrote the official history of the regiment, remembered:
There was now considerable sickness the men had not yet learned to take care of themselves, and the little regimental cemeteries soon claimed a number of the gallant boys who succumbed to the exposures and severity of the service. In these sad instances the excitement of war loses its grandeur and show, and the picture is well calculated to awaken reflections upon its horrors and its cruelties.
As the rest of the regiment moved on to Fredericksburg, McBay lay in the hospital complex built on the Hessian Barracks site on the south side of Frederick. The 29-year-old had been deputy postmaster in Selinsgrove before he mustered in in August 1862. The 131st regiment was composed of nine-month volunteers. Less than three months into his service, McBay contracted typhoid and passed away.
The illustration below is of the hospital complex at Frederick. Courtesy of the National Museum of Civil War Medicine.
The video below surveys the Union hospital at Frederick.
Frederick, Maryland as an Ideal Union Hospital Site During the Civil War from Heart of the Civil War on Vimeo.
Maryland's Heart of the Civil War
www.heartofthecivilwar.org
George Wunderlich, the executive director of the National Museum of Civil War Medicine, outlines why Frederick was the ideal place to put a Union hospital center during the Civil War due to its access to supplies, the ease of evacuation, and the good, clean, mountain air.