Alonzo H. Pickle

When the assault lines of the Second Corps stalled before the Confederate earthworks along the Darbytown and New Market roads on August 14, 1864, Company B of the 1st Minnesota Infantry Battalion came under punishing crossfire. The unit's commanding officer, Captain Henry D. O'Brien, had taken the field despite having been excused from duty due to illness, driving his men forward until a Confederate musket ball ripped through his right shoulder and lung. As the battalion fell back toward cover, O'Brien collapsed in the open, helpless and pinned within close range of the enemy's rifle pits. Sergeant Alonzo H. Pickle refused to leave his fallen commander behind. Pushing through the barrage, Pickle moved into the exposed clearing, reached O'Brien, hoisted the incapacitated officer onto his shoulders, and hauled him across the bullet-swept field to safety. O'Brien survived his traumatic wounds, and the rescue stood as the defining individual act of Pickle's military service.

Born in Farnham, Quebec, Canada, on July 2, 1843, Alonzo Huntingdon Pickle was the son of Simon and Sarah Taylor Pickle. He was baptized at St. James Anglican Church in Farnham in April 1849 before his family moved westward to the United States in 1855, residing briefly in Illinois before pre-empting a quarter section of farmland in Olmsted County, Minnesota, situated between Dover and Eyota. Working alongside his father on the family homestead, Pickle watched the outbreak of the American Civil War from the Minnesota prairie. On August 14, 1862, the nineteen-year-old farmer enlisted in the Union Army at St. Charles, with his enlistment officially credited to the town of Dover. He was mustered into Company K of the 1st Minnesota Volunteer Infantry Regiment, a formation serving in the Eastern Theater with the Army of the Potomac. Because individual service serial numbers were not created or assigned to enlisted soldiers by the United States War Department during the Civil War, Pickle was identified throughout the conflict solely by his name, rank, company, and regiment.

Pickle joined the regiment in Virginia during the autumn marches of 1862, seeing his first major combat at the Battle of Fredericksburg that December. Seven months after the fighting at Fredericksburg, the 1st Minnesota occupied the center of the Union line on Cemetery Ridge at Gettysburg. On July 2, 1863, his twentieth birthday, Pickle was in the ranks when Major General Winfield Scott Hancock ordered the regiment into a countercharge down the slope toward Plum Run to blunt an advancing Confederate brigade. Pickle emerged unwounded from the clash, which cost the regiment over eighty percent casualties, and joined the forty-seven survivors who rallied around the regimental colors at dusk. The unit fought again the following afternoon during the repulse of Pickett's Charge. Promoted to corporal in February 1864, Pickle served on recruiting duty in Minnesota while the original three-year enlistment of the regiment approached expiration. Soldiers whose original terms had not expired re-enlisted into the newly formed 1st Minnesota Infantry Battalion. Assigned to Company B, Pickle was promoted to sergeant on July 22, 1864, three weeks prior to the offensive at Deep Bottom.

The rescue of Captain O'Brien remained firmly etched in the memory of the regiment, but decades passed before official recognition caught up with the act. The War Department reviewed the affidavits of his comrades and formally awarded Pickle the Medal of Honor on June 12, 1895. The full official citation, published in the War Department registers and maintained by the Congressional Medal of Honor Society and the Department of the Army, reads:

"At the risk of his life, voluntarily went to the assistance of a wounded officer lying close to the enemy's lines and, under fire, carried him to a place of safety."

Pickle sustained his frontline combat service through the prolonged trench warfare of the Petersburg Siege, participating in engagements at Jerusalem Plank Road, Second Reams Station, and Hatcher's Run. During the Appomattox Campaign, he was on active picket duty when Confederate troops surrendered their arms on April 9, 1865. Promoted to first sergeant on May 1, Pickle paraded with the battalion during the Grand Review of the Armies down Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington, D.C., on May 23, receiving his honorable discharge at Bailey's Crossroads, Virginia, on June 7, 1865.

Civilian life brought varied commercial enterprises across southern Minnesota. Pickle worked as a farmer, horse dealer, and drayman in Olmsted County for over a decade, marrying Rhoda Jane Smith in 1876 and raising four children. He subsequently supervised a cattle ranch near Tracy in Lyon County, moved to Golden Gate in Brown County in 1888, and settled in Sleepy Eye in 1892. Operating a successful real estate and insurance agency, Pickle remained active in the Grand Army of the Republic and attended the fiftieth anniversary Blue and Gray reunion on the Gettysburg battlefield in July 1913. Following the death of his wife in August 1923, Pickle resided in Sleepy Eye until his death on May 24, 1925, at the age of eighty-one. The mayor ordered municipal businesses to close during his funeral, and he was buried with military honors in Home Cemetery.