"Battles Long Ago"

A Hoosier Civil War Veteran and His Memoir of Service in the Western Theater

George P. Clark

The author of this memoir, Louis Bir, was a prominent businessman and community leader of New Albany, Indiana, at the time of his death, at the age of 80, March 6, 1923. Like so many soldiers of the Civil War, he was still a green teenager when he enlisted in Indiana's 93rd Infantry Regiment in 1862, but very much a seasoned veteran when he returned home at war's end in 1865. There was little to keep him in the farming community where he was raised, the namesake of his French immigrant father, but there was much to attract a clever young man who had witnessed the expansion of Ohio River commerce during the war. In those years New Albany, just below the Falls of the Ohio and only a dozen miles from his birthplace, had become a major supply and shipbuilding port and the second-largest city in the state. And Bir recognized it as a still-important riverine commercial center where he could exercise his industry and shrewdness in establishing a business of his own. Success was not to come quickly, however, to a landless veteran, soon married and with children, but with little grammar school education. There is no information available about his immediate postwar years, but his later career in business argues that he was industrious and acquiring capital in New Albany. In Williams' New Albany Directory For 1871–72, one finds Louis Bir as the proprietor of one of the city's several dozen bakeries serving its more than 15,000 citizens. Ten years later he was well established in New Albany as the owner of a sawmill that processed lumber rafted downriver from West Virginia and Kentucky. Raised in the heavily wooded hills above the city, he had observed as a soldier the importance of the lumber industry in supplying material for camps and fortifications. And back home he noted the many mills providing lumber for the shipbuilding that flourished on the Ohio River waterfront. A brief, unpublished note, "History of Bir Lumber Co. 1883 to Present [1954]," written by his grandson, Harry E. Bir, chronicles Louis's success in business as he became sole owner of Bir Lumber Company and diversified into real estate and the important glass-making industry in New Albany. His obituary noted his wartime service and observed, "He was widely known here, and was considered one of the city's most substantial business men."1	1
The tombstone of Louis Bir père in Floyd County, Indiana. A French immigrant, he died when his son and namesake was only seven years old. Courtesy George P. Clark
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