Elias Rice

June 1, 2022

Although the Civil War is now long past, it is fitting to recognize Perry County, Pennsylvania, boys who marched away to battlefields. Many returned. Some did not. Let’s give our respect to all.

This month’s soldier is Elias Rice, son of miller Jeremiah Rice of Landisburg. For three years, Elias served willingly until he was captured in the Battle of the Wilderness and marched away to Andersonville Prison, Georgia.

Only three weeks after the start of the Civil War, Elias signed up and served for three years in Company B, Seventh Pennsylvania Reserves (36th Pennsylvania Regiment), surely fighting bravely in the battles of Antietam, Fredericksburg, and the Wilderness.

During the Wilderness, however, it was not enough. Apparently surrounded by the Confederates, the commanding officer of the regiment surrendered “as further resistance would have involved a hopeless butchery of his men.” The privates were marched to the Andersonville Prison and the officers to Macon, both in Georgia. Sixty-seven of the privates died over the course of the next several months. Elias was one of them, dying on September 3, 1864. 

Sadly, Elias was not the only son that his parents, Jeremiah and Catherine Rice, lost to the war. According to the inscription on the family marker in the Landisburg Cemetery, Josiah Rice died on September 28, 1864, a prisoner at Savannah, Georgia, only three weeks after Elias.

Seemingly no record of Josiah’s service exists; however, a notation beside Josiah’s name in the U.S., Civil War Draft Registrations Records, 1863-1865 does give a possible explanation—“Now a contract teamster in the Army.”

Although Elias and his brother and other young soldiers across the Perry County did not return home, they were not forgotten. More than twenty years after the end of the Civil War, veterans in Landisburg and the vicinity formed a GAR Post and named it after Elias Rice.

Most everyone would have known Jeremiah, for he was the town miller. They had shared in his grief at losing two sons to the war. The very next year after the formation of the GAR Post,  Jeremiah Rice, Elias’s father, presented the post with a large photograph of Elias. For decades, citizens honored Elias and other fallen soldiers.