Dressed in his Army uniform, Theodore Patrick Gould (1830-1862) posed for this photograph early in the Civil War. Theodore was a son of Patrick Talmage Gould (1799-1879) and the former Jerusha Dayton Fithian (1804-1879). His brothers were Jonathan (1833-1907) and Alexander Gould (1835-1885).
Their father grew up in the Jericho section of East Hampton (near present-day Jericho Road and Cove Hollow Road) and served as keeper of the Montauk Lighthouse from May 1832 to October 1849. Patrick also helped run Third House during Theodore’s early years. The family returned to East Hampton in 1850.
The photograph was taken at H. Terry’s Sag Harbor studio, between the war’s outbreak in April 1861 and Theodore’s death on Oct. 21, 1862. According to a supplement to the New York State census of 1865, Theodore died at age 32 at Carver Hospital in Washington, D.C., from “sickness acquired [during his] service,” barely over a month after enlisting in New York’s 127th Infantry Regiment on Sept. 8, 1862.
The hospital was one of more than 20 that sprang up in the nation’s capital during the Civil War. The Sanitary Commission’s efforts to institute basic hygiene practices in military hospitals and innovations in medical care during the war led the hospital mortality rate for soldiers to drop to a “previously unheard of 8 percent” by 1865. When Carver Hospital opened in December 1861, it was designed around cutting-edge ideas for improving ventilation.
Among the 23 other Civil War casualties from East Hampton, Edwin Worthington and William Warren Collum also survived only a couple of months in the Army. Both men were buried in the Carolinas, near where they died. Theodore is buried in East Hampton’s South End Burying Ground with many other veterans.
Monday is Memorial Day, a holiday that emerged from guidance issued in 1868 by a fraternal organization of Civil War veterans designating the day for “the purpose of . . . decorating the graves of comrades who died [defending] their country.” As you rush through the start of summer traffic this Memorial Day, consider stopping at the South End Burying Ground to pay your respects to Theodore and other veterans buried there.
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Andrea Meyer, a librarian and archivist, is head of collection for the East Hampton Library’s Long Island Collection.
