David K. Hobart

HOBART

Posted By: S. Ferrall (email)
Date: 1/11/2007 at 03:51:42

David Kimball Hobart of Company G [44th Mass INF] was born in Boston in 1835, and graduated from the Boston High School as sixteen, to enter on a business career. At the age of twenty-two he established himself as a merchant in McGregor, Iowa, where he became mayor of the city, but had returned to Boston just before the war. Preferring the position of private with his companions in the Forty-fourth to a commission elsewhere, he had become orderly sergeant of his company at the time of his last engagement. He was wounded in a skirmish at "Little" Washington, March 30, 1863, and with two other wounded men fell into the hands of the enemy, and was taken first to the Confederate hospital at Greenville, then to that at Wilson, N.C. Whatever may have been the experiences of the Union prisoners elsewhere, nothing could have exceeded the kindness or skilful medical attention received by Hobart at both these hospitals. He had the gentlest of nursing, the best of care from the surgeons, frequent visits from ministers, and daily gifts of flowers from the women of the neighborhood. He had been shot through the lungs; but the native vigor of his constitution, aided by such devoted ministrations, prolonged his life for many days. He died April 14, 1863, in his twenty-eighth year, and was honorably buried in the hospital cemetery at Wilson.
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source: "Record of the service of the Forty-fourth Massachusetts Volunteer Militia in North Carolina, August 1862 to May 1863"; Boston: Priv. print., 1887; Chapter XIV, Forty-Fourth Massachusetts Infantry, pg 260