The following is an article from the Pocono Record, Stroudsburg, Pa. Sunday February 13, 1994 Lincoln Recruited Stroudsburg Man for Civil War duty. On the final afternoon of September, 1864, young John Summerfield Staples of Stroudsburg was strolling leisurely along Pennsylvania Ave in Washington, D.C., with his father, the Rev. John L. Staples. Father and son were temporarily away from home in wartime, working at the nearby Washington Navy Yard. The younger Staples, who had just turned 20, did not know any one was looking for him that Friday afternoon. He had no idea his life would be altered forever before his walk ended. A man approached and introduced himself as a military draft official, and asked young Staples whether he would volunteer for service in the Union Army. That was not an unusual request at the time, nor was his answer " yes". It was also not unusual for the stranger to ask the father's permission to draft his son, who was not yet 21. The chance meeting, however, was extraordinary in several respects. The stranger, for one, was Noble D. Larner, president of the Third Ward Draft Club in the District of Columbia. And Larner was on a special mission: He had himself been approached a few days earlier by Provost General James B. Frey, and instructed to scour the White House neighborhood in search of a " suitable recruit." Frey's instructions came from the top: President Abraham Lincoln. Larner, accompanied by several other draft officials, had found the President this man. And Staples, who would meet Lincoln the very next day, would enjoy a peculiar kind of celebrity. Staples, is often believed to have served as a Civil War substitute for Lincoln. But that is not so, because Lincoln was not technically eligible to serve in the Union Army. Staples' selection on Lincoln's behalf instead was in keeping with a policy that the President himself had instituted. In a directive, Lincoln had called upon officeholders in his administration who, like himself, were not eligible for military service, to recruit volunteers in their stead. Staples was, in official terms, a recruit. This one event in his life call it " The Lincoln Event" was eventually to make J. Summerfield Staples a civil War celebrity. That event occurred on Oct. 1, 1864, the day after the young man was spotted by Larner. After shaking hands with Summerfield, Lincoln remarked that he was a good looking, stout and healthy-appearing young man, and believed he would do his duty. Staples, had in fact already done his duty, having enlisted in the Army in 1862, at age 18, as a paid substitute for Robert A. Barry of Monroe County. Staples had even seen combat, with the 176th Pennsylvania Drafted Military Infantry. He was discharged in May, 1863, after contracting an illness. But Staples did his duty a second time - even if, by Civil War story standards, it was unremarkable and relatively brief. As a member of the Second District of Columbia Regiment, Staples' Union Army tour was spent in the Washington, D.C. area ( among other things, he was a guard at the Prince Street Prison in nearby Alexandria, Va.) He became ill again the following spring and was allowed to go home to recuperate. The war ended while he was home, and his military career came to an end less than a year after it had begun, on Sept. 12, 1865. Staples lived to be only 43 years old, and his celebrity is peculiar because it was not until after he died that he was widely recognized. Within days after his meeting with Lincoln, a story in the New York Herald ensured his immediate celebrity status, while less prominent news items about Lincoln's "representative recruit," appeared in the Washington Star and the New York Tribune. But Staples was curiously ignored by his home town media, even after he returned home and with his father resumed a pre-war wheelwright business. Not until 21 years after his death ( in 1888) did the public, locally and nationally, become genuinely interested in his unique career in the Union Army. And that was only because there was a revival of interest in Lincoln on the 100th anniversary of his birth, in 1909. A year later, the war department spent up to 20,000 dollars to erect a suitable monument to Staples on Court House Square in Stroudsburg, Pa. He has since also been memorialized in print by the famous Lincoln biographer, Carl Sandburg. === Terry Wilson 40 S. Gamble Street Shelby, OH 44875 Researching: ALLEN, COLTMAN, EDMAN, FERRIS, HARLAN/HARLAND, HOLLENBAUGH, HORNER, JANNY/JANNEY/JENNING, KELLER, KLINKLE, KRUNK/CRUNK/CRONK,MARING/MEARING, MAY, McCORMIC/McCORMICK, SEAMAN, SHOMO, SIFFERLIN, TOUSLEY/TOSELEY, & WILSON _________________________________________________________ DO YOU YAHOO!? Get your free @yahoo.com address at http://mail.yahoo.com