May 23 

 

          On this day in 1862, Private Atlas Hoffner (1840-1862) of the 49th North Carolina Infantry died in a hospital at Goldsboro of measles. An illiterate laborer from Rowan County, Hoffner volunteered into Company C, 49th North Carolina at its formation on March 19, 1862. The regiment rendezvoused at Camp Mangum in Raleigh for training. At this concentration of rural boys, communicable diseases spread rapidly, and Hoffner picked up the ubiquitous childhood disease of measles. Today about one of every thousand infected persons can die from acute medical complications from measles. However, during the Civil War, when soldiers contracted measles they were also simultaneously being exposed to multiple other germs carrying other, more dangerous, diseases–like pneumonia. Overall, about one of out every fifteen infected Civil War soldiers probably died of the contagion and its complications. Private Hoffner was one of those unfortunate soldiers. 

 

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Sources: 

Weymouth T. Jordan, Jr., comp., North Carolina Troops, 1861-1865: A Roster, 12:58; 1860 U.S. Census: Rowan County, NC; Judkin Browning and Timothy Silver, An Environmental History of the Civil War (2020), 10-11.