Kate Wheeler Cooper
Featured Character – The Home Front
"Spear's
Cavalry Expedition Entering Murfreesboro, North Carolina" (July 28,
1863)
Courtesy of the North Carolina
Collection, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Library
Catherine
(Kate) Pugh Wheeler was born in 1837
and raised in Murfreesboro,
North Carolina.
Her uncle, John
Hill Wheeler, was a widely known historian and politician and her
grandmother
was the wife of Governor John Branch. Kate Wheeler studied both at the
Chowan
Female Collegiate Institute and at a private school in Raleigh
before marrying John Walston Cooper
in 1866. Her correspondence with her sister, Julia, school friends, and
her
grandmother reveal much about the times in which the letters were
written, such
as college life, religious attitudes, and the social expectations of
women’s
dress and conduct. She also gave good insight as to the plight of women
during
the war. Letters from her brother in June 1861 describe the living
conditions
of the Hertford Light Infantry (Company K, 17th
North Carolina
Infantry) on Portsmouth
Island, North
Carolina, and the discovery
of Union ships off Hatteras. An October 1862 letter concerns the
presence of
Buffaloes in the Albemarle
region. Kate Wheeler Cooper also kept a diary that mentioned several
developments in Murfreesboro
during the war, such as the use of the town as barracks by Union troops
and the
use of the Baptist church as a hospital in 1862. She continued her
correspondence and kept her diary even after the war, documenting many
events. In
1866, Catherine Wheeler married John Walston Cooper.
She died in 1912.