During the Battle of Shiloh, Palmer was
sent to
Corinth, Miss., where she worked day and
night in a
church and under
the trees, administering chloroform and
binding
arteries, among other services, to the
most
desperately wounded.
Palmer and her pitiful charges were
constantly moved
throughout the war as the enemy neared
or when a
hospital was
more desperately needed elsewhere. At
one point,
when surgeons were going to leave behind
seven men
they thought
were near death, Palmer insisted the
invalids be
moved too, and she returned all but one
to good
health. In Forsyth,
Ga., the hospital tents overflowed with
1,800 sick
and wounded. Townspeople were struck by
Palmer's
devotion to her
patients and helped by providing all
manner of
services and goods needed by the men in
gray. They
made bowers out of
limbs, cots of leafy branches, and cups
and dishes
from a local clay bed. Palmer's devotion
to the
soldiers was
impressive: traveling to Auburn, Ala.,
Palmer was
injured when her train derailed and went
over a
trestle. But after
just three weeks in a hospital she made
her way to
Auburn and resumed her nursing
duties.
Ella Palmer responded to a call to
citizens
to help the many Confederate soldiers
who were
suffering, lying
on the floor and shivering without
blankets in a
makeshift hospital in Chattanooga, Tenn.
Accompanied
by her five
year old daughter, Palmer donated her
worldly goods
to the hospital and then took charge as
its matron.
Palmer quickly
organized two kitchens and a linen
room, and she
ministered to the sick and dying at all
hours.
Though the hospital
corps had consisted of men only, the
surgeons
welcomed the widow's help.
After the war Palmer and her
daughter returned
to Tennessee. In 1873 Palmer moved to
Colorado,
where she studied
mineralogy and became an expert
assayer. She
discovered gold near Lake City,
Colorado, before she
died at the age of
80.