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Wilbur Wightman Gramling was born on March 30, 1843. Prior to the Civil War, his parents Andrew Peter and Elizabeth Gramling, moved from Madison County to Centerville in Leon County with their five children.
Wilbur Gramling enlisted with his brother, Irvin, in Company K of the 5th Florida Regiment at Tallahassee on February 20, 1862. Gramling missed several months' service during the winter of 1862 to 1863 due to illness, but otherwise was present for several major battles including Antietam, Chancellorsville, and Gettysburg.
At the May 1864 Battle of the Wilderness in Virginia, Union troops wounded and captured Gramling. After spending a short time in a field hospital at Fredericksburg, Gramling transferred to the U.S. Army General Hospital at Columbian College in Washington, D.C., and then to Lincoln General Hospital in the same city. Following this recovery, he was briefly placed in the Old Capital Prison before being sent to the prisoner-of-war camp at Elmira, New York on July 23, 1864. One of the major Union POW camps, Elmira had a particularly high death rate.
Gramling languished at Elmira for the remainder of the war. He took the oath of allegiance to the United States government on June 21, 1865, more than two months after Lee's Army of Northern Virginia had laid down its arms. Gramling's parole, signed at the time of his release, listed his place of residence as Thomasville, Georgia.
Gramling lived in Centerville, Florida after the war. He died on December 3, 1870, from a lung ailment contracted at Elmira. He was twenty-seven years old at the time of his death and is believed to be buried in the Pisgah Church Cemetery in Leon County.
Summary:
This collection comprises one of the very few surviving diaries written by a Florida soldier in the Civil War. It is even rarer in that it documents the experiences of a Florida serviceman incarcerated in a Union prisoner-of-war camp. The entries are relatively short, concentrating on topics such as food, weather, living conditions, illnesses among the prisoners, war news, condition of family and friends, and the hope for exchange. Of interest is Gramling's May 23, 1864, entry in which he mentions seeing President and Mrs. Lincoln pass by his prison in a carriage. The diary entries were written in ink in a small black pocket diary.
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Additional Physical Form:
This collection has been digitized and is available on the Florida Memory web site: https://www.floridamemory.com/discover/historical_records/gramling/
Typescript also available.
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Ownership/Custodial History:
Mr. Owen Gramling, Jr. is the great-nephew of Wilbur Wightman Gramling.
Confederate States of America. Army. --Florida Infantry Regiment, 5th.
Military hospitals. Military prisons. Wilderness, Battle of the, Va., 1864.
Diaries. aat
Elmira (N.Y.) Fredericksburg (Va.) United States History Civil War, 1861-1865
for detailed listing.