Letters & Diaries
letters
Nadenbousch Family (1861)
John Quincy Adams Nadenbousch served as a colonel for the confederate army during the civil war. He was born in 1824 and lived in Berkeley, Virginia with his wife Hester J. Nadenbousch. Hester would die in 1879 while John lived on until 1892.
According to the 1860 census, John Nadenbousch was 35 years old at the outbreak of the war and lived with his wife, Hester, in Berkeley County, Virginia (which became West Virginia during the war). John enlisted in the Confederate Army and in 1863 he rented a house for his family in Staunton and purchased a local hotel. John resigned his army commission in 1864 and remained in Staunton as late as 1866, while his wife remained in Berkeley County. In his correspondence with his wife, John discussed the conditions of wartime Staunton and Augusta County, wartime slavery, Lincoln's reelection in 1864, and the destruction of the infrastructure of the Valley during the later years of the war.