Annie Wittenmter
General Ulysses S. Grant, commander of the Union Army said of Wittenmyer, “No soldier on the firing line gave more heroic service than she did.”
Sarah Ann Turner (Annie) was born in Sandy Springs, Ohio to a family that greatly valued education. Therefore, even though she was a girl, Annie was allowed to attend school.
In 1847, when she was twenty, she married William Wittenmyer, and in 1850 they moved to Keokuk. Three years later, she started Iowa’s first tuition-free school for underprivileged children. She also set up Sunday Schools and used her gift as a poet to write hymns for the children.
When the Civil War started, Wittenmyer became the secretary of the Keokuk Ladies’ Soldiers’ Aid Society, visited troop encampments, organized a statewide system of local aids to provide medical supplies, and wrote letters to army officials and the women of Iowa, urging them to offer aid to improve the diet and sanitation in army hospitals. Soon she was put in charge of all hospital kitchens of the Union army.
In September 1862, Wittenmyer became the first woman to be distinctively named in an Iowa legislative document by being appointed to the Iowa State Sanitary Commission. She also helped the orphans of the war, founding several orphanages in Iowa including the Iowa Soldiers’ Orphans’ Home, which was later named after her.
In 1874 Wittenmyer was elected the first president of the National Woman’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU), which focused on removing alcohol from American life. She was the author of several books, including an autobiography, and she edited the WCTU’s periodical Our Union. Her focus returned to veterans and 1889, she became the President of the Woman’s Relief Corps.
In 1898, Congress expressed its appreciation for her service to the nation by granting Wittenmyer a pension of her own. She died on February 2, 1900, in Sanatoga, Pennsylvania from a cardiac asthma attack. She was 72.