Charles Conrad Becker

At the age of 17, he enlisted in 1864 as a private in Company H, 128th Indiana Infantry. He fought in the "Battle Above the Clouds" on Lookout Mountain in Tennessee and was one of 60,000 soldiers on General William T. Sherman’s march to the sea. After the war Charles Becker was among those assigned the grisly duty to re-inter the bodies of nearly 10,000 Union soldiers who died of starvation and disease at the Confederate prison in Salisbury, NC, and were buried in mass graves. He didn’t approve of slavery and was a very patriotic individual. He was one of 3.3 million soldiers who survived the Civil War. Harold Becker, the son of Charles, was the youngest of four children born to Barbara and Charles Becker. It was a second marriage for Charles, who at 54 divorced his first wife and married his nursemaid, who was 30 years younger than him. Charles had six children by his first wife. He was seventy-one years old when Harold was born. For years Harold kept his father’s war stories to himself, but in recent years has been sharing them with his wife, their five children, seven grandchildren and his great-grandchildren. (2005) He is 89 years old. He joined the John Logan Camp, the Grand Rapids Chapter of the Sons of the Union Veterans of the Civil War.