Elliott, John B. d. 1896

ELLIOTT

Posted By: Barbara Hug (email)
Date: 7/24/2003 at 09:35:33

A Veteran Mustered Out

John B. Elliott, an old soldier of Company K, Twenty-eighty, Iowa, died at his home in Lynnville, at six o’clock last Tuesday morning, of cancer of the stomach and was buried yesterday. Mr. Elliott’s age was fifty-nine years and he had been a resident of Lynnville since about 1855. He leaves a wife and two grown up daughters.

Comrade Elliott enlisted in 1852,* in Col. Meyer’s company in the twenty-eighth Iowa, and was a brave and gallant soldier. In the summer of 1864, while his regiment was doing duty at Savannah, Georgia, he and a few comrades were out about a mile from camp hunting blackberries in a large swamp, when John B. was bitten on the leg by a rattlesnake and it was only by the greatest efforts of the surgeons that his life was saved – and for a long time “hung in the balance. Every summer since then at about the same time Mr. Elliott has had a sick spell with the same sensations and symptoms that marked his struggle for life when he was first bitten – his flesh turned spotted like the snake, as it did when he lay in the hospital tent at Savannah. It was believed by many that Mr. Elliott’s death was really the result of the terrible poison received in his system at that time, nearly thirty-two years ago. Quite a number of the boys of Company K went to Lynnville yesterday to attend the funeral of their old comrade. ~ The Newton (Iowa) Record, Friday, February 28, 1896, Page 1, Column 1 [Note: * the text reads “1852.”]