Curiosity unlocks mystery of Confederate coat

The Morgan family plot at Old City Cemetery has always intrigued Ted Delaney.

The plot, located within a few yards of the Taylor Street entrance, is one of the cemetery’s most prominent and one Delaney, the cemetery’s archivist and curator, passes every day driving into work.

“I’ve always wondered,” he says, “‘Who are they?’”

Now, thanks to the research of several people, Delaney knows quite a bit about the family, from parents James and Caroline Morgan, who died in 1847 and 1883, respectively — all the way down to their living descendants, some of whom visited Lynchburg last month.

The Morgan family’s story is “interwoven through the history of the city,” says Doug Harvey, director of the Lynchburg Museum.

James Morgan’s father was one of the city’s early mayors. James himself was a wealthy tobacconist and landowner, and his son-in-law, Colonel Augustus Forsberg, designed Holy Cross Catholic Church and was Lynchburg’s first city engineer.

While the men held prominent positions in the community, it was the women who gave their family history a little personality.

Here are their stories.

The Confederate coat

Perhaps one of the most interesting figures in the family was James and Caroline’s daughter, Mary Morgan Otey Forsberg, known as Mollie, whose Confederate coat is currently on display at the Lynchburg Museum.

(Mollie, who died in 1918, isn’t buried in the Old City Cemetery plot; she’s in the Presbyterian Cemetery alongside her second husband, Colonel Augustus Forsberg. Her first husband, George Gaston Otey, died in 1862, and Mollie met the colonel two years later, when he came to Lynchburg’s Ladies Relief Hospital, where she volunteered, to recover from injuries sustained while fighting in the Civil War.)

Harvey knew about Mollie’s coat long before he put it on display. Back when he was working at the American Civil War Center in Richmond, Harvey called the Lynchburg Museum’s then-director and asked him “to tell me about your coolest Civil War things,” Harvey recalls.

The director told him about Mollie’s coat, which had been donated to the museum 50 years earlier by her daughter, Hilda Davis.

Mollie made it using pieces of Forsberg’s Confederate uniform at a time when Confederate veterans were not allowed to wear their military insignia in public.

“It looks like she took the buttons and the braids from one of his coats,” Harvey says. “She made it to march around Lynchburg in and to thumb her nose at the Union Army that was occupying the area.”

Last spring, Harvey decided it was time to break out the coat for an exhibit.

There was just one problem — they need more information and materials to go on display with it.

“We need the photographs and the history,” Harvey says, “to flesh out (her) story.”

Harvey started poring through museum and library files, searching for any trace of the Morgan/Forsberg family. He specifically wanted to know if any descendants still lived in Lynchburg.

He came across faded newspaper photos of Mollie and Augustus, but couldn’t find much else.

“At that point, we were desperate,” he says. “We’ve got this cool coat, and no images to go with it.”

Harvey expanded his search online and came across an article about a Margaret F. Hodgdon donating Forsberg’s diary to the Washington & Lee University library in 1981.

Margaret, who lived in Ingomar, Penn., was the granddaughter of Mollie and Augustus Forsberg. Her father, Rudolph, was their son.

After searching for her name online, Harvey eventually found an obituary. She’d died three weeks earlier.

Undeterred, he used the obituary to track down Margaret’s surviving relatives and got a phone number for Dick and Sue Hodgdon, Margaret’s son and daughter-in-law, in Pittsburgh.

“So I called up this woman, totally out of the blue, and I kept waiting for her to hang up on me,” Harvey says of Sue. “Once I told her why I was calling, she said, ‘I think we have what you’re looking for in a box right here.’”

It just so happened that Sue Hodgdon was doing her own genealogical research into the Morgan/Forsberg family, something her mother-in-law started in the early 1980s.

Margaret had kept all of the family records and photographs in that box, and “I just picked up the thread where she left off,” says Hodgdon, adding that she and her husband are history buffs.

She even had the original 1865 photo of Mollie in the Confederate coat.

“When Doug called, it opened up this whole new world of opportunities,” Hodgdon says. “It was kind of serendipitous in a lot of ways.”

Sue and Dick Hodgdon have come to Lynchburg several times since that phone call, most recently at the end of September. During the trip, they visited family plots at Old City Cemetery, Spring Hill Cemetery and the Presbyterian Cemetery, as well as the museum and some old family homes.

“The Lynchburg history had sort of left, but they had preserved it,” Harvey says. “It’s been a really heartwarming thing that those generous people have allowed us to bring it back.”

‘A woman ahead of her time’

Around the same time that Harvey was conducting his search, Delaney had suggested that cemetery volunteer Lynn Spies, recently retired from teaching English and writing at Randolph College, look into a different branch of the Morgan family tree.

“These are people who lived and died in the 1800s,” he says. “There’s no family left (around here). No one remembers them.”

Spies was interested in doing research, particularly about women who were buried in the cemetery, so Delaney turned her on to Mollie’s mother, Caroline Morford Morgan.

“I just got fascinated by her because she seemed to be a woman ahead of her time,” Spies says. “The more I got into the family and more and more into her, I got obsessed.”

She even wrote a scene about Caroline and her second husband for the cemetery’s Candlelight Tours (see box for more information).

A New Jersey native whose family is connected to the founding of Princeton, Caroline’s story parallels that of her daughter in many ways. Her first husband, wealthy landowner James Morgan, died on the way home from a business trip in 1847, leaving her a widow with three children.

“He left her with all this property and no husband,” Harvey says. “There’s probably a movie and a miniseries in there somewhere.”

After her husband’s death, Spies says Caroline took an active role in her late husband’s business affairs, something that was uncommon for women during that time.

She also remarried — William Allison, a man 16 years her junior, in 1849 — but it was a short-lived, tumultuous union.

“It seems clear that he served as a kind of social protection for her,” Spies says. “Here she was, a woman in the South, and she wasn’t a Southerner. She married (again) in order to have that social protection, but she definitely wanted to take care of her business affairs.”

Spies found several documents that gave her some insight into their relationship: love letters from their courtship; an “indenture,” or prenuptial agreement, that kept Caroline in control of her property and income; and a resolution William wrote, listing his grievances against her as their marriage fell apart.

No record of their divorce has been found yet, but Spies says it was likely between 1852 and 1857.

After their divorce, she went back to the last name Morgan and lived the rest of her life in Lynchburg.

Spies says there’s not much record of Caroline during the 30 years between her divorce and death, other than an obituary. She has yet to even find a photograph of the woman.

“It’s kind of a mystery,” Spies says, adding that a few more pieces fell into place after she met the Hodgdons last month.

“I thought I was finished with the biography, and then these documents were made available to me, and I was able to fill in the gaps.”

Spies says doing the research on a strong woman from Lynchburg’s past has been rewarding.

“We hear so much about the male forebears,” she says. “I think it’s really important for the women’s stories to come out, too.”