♂Jacob Schneck

Jacob Schneck (11 December 1843 – 18 December 1906) was a physician of Mount Carmel, Illinois, who served in the Civil War first as an Indiana infantryman and then as a sailor in the United States Navy. A county history of 1883 says that after he was captured at the Battle of Jackson in 1863 and paroled, a faulty prisoner exchange kept him from rejoining his regiment, so he enlisted in the navy instead and served in the campaign off Mobile. He was the great-grandfather of Nancy Jane Blanchard (1929–2006), through his son Sereno Watson Schneck (1875–1953) and Sereno’s daughter Mary Esther Schneck (1900–1968). He was also a botanist, whose name several plants carry, and a collector of Native American antiquities, some of which are in the Smithsonian Institution.

Early life

Jacob was born on 11 December 1843 near New Harmony, Posey County, Indiana, the eldest child of John F. Schneck (1812–1857) and Elizabeth Burkhart (1821–1876). His father was a German immigrant, born in Württemberg, who had come to America in 1839 and settled at Lancaster, Pennsylvania. There in January 1843 he married Elizabeth, a native of Alsace, then part of France, who had crossed the Atlantic as a child with her parents. Later the same year the young couple moved west to New Harmony, where Jacob was born in December. By 1850 the family was in Harmony Township, Posey County, where the father, whom the census taker wrote down as Frederick, worked as a carpenter and held $600 in land. Jacob, aged six, was the eldest of three children.

His father died in 1857, leaving six children. His mother stayed on in Posey County and kept the farm going: by 1870 she was listed as a widow and a farmer in her own right, with $4,500 in real estate, working the land with three of her sons. The Mount Carmel Register later printed a family tradition that the Schnecks had originally lived in Westphalia, been driven out by wars and persecutions, and moved to Stuttgart; no record is cited for it.

The war

On 13 November 1861, at seventeen, Jacob enlisted as a private in Company E of the 60th Indiana Volunteer Infantry, in which he later served as a corporal. With the regiment he fought at the Battle of Munfordville^W in Kentucky in September 1862 and at the Battle of Arkansas Post^W in Arkansas on 11 January 1863, and he was at the siege of Vicksburg^W in 1863.

In July 1863, a few days after the fall of Vicksburg, he was captured on the skirmish line at the Battle of Jackson, Mississippi, then paroled and sent north. Because of “some irregularity in the exchange” he was never regularly exchanged, and so could not rejoin his regiment. Instead, on 18 May 1864, he enlisted in the navy at Brooklyn, New York, as a landsman. He served first on a vessel that watched for and captured blockade runners, and then on the USS Metacomet, which fought under Admiral Farragut at Mobile; he took part in the naval campaign off Mobile, at Fort Morgan and at Spanish Fort. He was mustered out at Philadelphia on 31 May 1865.

Medicine

After the war he studied at an academy at Owensville, Indiana, and taught school. By 1867 he had decided on medicine and was at Olney, Illinois, reading under a Dr. Goslin; he then moved to Mount Carmel to continue under Dr. William Graham. In the winter of 1868–69 he attended a course of lectures at the Chicago Medical College, but he ran short of money, so he taught again, and he came back to graduate as a doctor of medicine in March 1871. By June 1870 he was already living at Mount Carmel in the same dwelling as Dr. Graham and was counted as a physician, aged 26, beside his old teacher, a physician and surgeon.

He practised at Mount Carmel for the rest of his life. He also became a railway surgeon, serving the Cairo division of the Big Four system and the Illinois Central Railroad, and the Southern railroad as well, and he belonged to the American Medical Association and the state medical society. His son and his grandson both became doctors after him. In 1906 his son’s father-in-law, Robert Thomas Wilkinson, wrote to his widow that Dr. Schneck’s care had saved his life during a serious illness.

Marriage and family

On 28 November 1872, in Mount Carmel Precinct, he married Mary Hartman (1850–1920), a daughter of John Hartman and Mary Beal, whose parents were both born in Hesse-Darmstadt according to her entry in the 1880 census, though other records place her mother elsewhere. The couple had one son, Sereno Watson Schneck, born in 1875. In 1880 the three of them lived in Mount Carmel with a fourteen-year-old servant boy who was still at school.

Science and public life

Outside the surgery he was a man of wide interests. He was a Methodist, a Mason who rose to High Priest in the Mount Carmel chapter, a Republican and a temperance advocate. He was a charter member of the Mount Carmel Scientific Society and its president from 1889 to 1891 and of the Wabash Medical Society, and belonged to the state medical and natural history societies, to the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and to the Torrey Botanical Club^W. In 1892 the Illinois State Medical Society printed his paper “Some common errors in the physical training, education and dress of girls”.

He became known first as a botanist. His catalogue of the flora of the Wabash Valley below the mouth of the White River was printed in 1876 in the Indiana state geologist’s report for 1875, and he went on writing short notes for the Botanical Gazette into the 1900s. In 1877 John Merle Coulter^W reviewed the catalogue in the Botanical Gazette and noted “the many rare plants contained in this list”. In 1881 Coulter and Barnes’s catalogue of Indiana plants relied on him for the south-western counties. His 1884 notes on mistletoe (Phoradendron) in the Gazette were still cited in a 2014 study.

The State of Illinois appointed him to prepare an exhibit of Illinois woods for the New Orleans Exposition^W of 1884–85, and an 1895 paper by Robert Ridgway^W on the native trees of the lower Wabash valley was chiefly built on the measurements he took for it. On 24 August 1894 Charles Sprague Sargent^W, the author of The Silva of North America, collected with him at Mount Carmel, and the specimen they gathered that day is the type of Acer saccharum var. schneckii. Sargent later described a hybrid hickory, Carya × schneckii, whose type is Jacob’s own specimen from Lawrenceville, dated 15 October 1895.

According to a biographical note by Clark Kimberling of the University of Evansville, the botanist Nathaniel Lord Britton^W named a red oak Quercus schneckii, the Schneck oak, from the distinctive acorns Jacob had reported to him. A 1929 Illinois Natural History Survey bulletin on the trees of Illinois says that the Schneck oak was “named in honor of Dr. Jacob Schneck of Mt. Carmel”. Beall Woods, a nature preserve in Wabash County, still has a Schneck Trail and a Schneck Oak named after him. Bailey’s 1945 paper on a bramble, Rubus schneckii, cites specimens he collected in 1901 and 1902.

He also wrote a little history. In 1890 he published a short pamphlet on the Rappite community and the scientists of early New Harmony, The Rappites: Interesting Notes about Early New Harmony, printed at Evansville. A copy of his history of early New Harmony, probably this pamphlet, was placed in the cornerstone of the New Harmony library.

His other passion was archaeology. The Pioneers of Wabash County (1919) credits “the late Dr. Jacob Schneck” with having located ninety-two mounds in the county and explored many of them, which made his work its main survey of the Native American remains. His friend and neighbour B. A. Harvey recalled in 1918 that he had often acted as the doctor’s guide to the mounds along the Wabash, which he had found as a boy. Family papers say all those mounds have since been destroyed. In 1882 E. A. Barber’s article “Mound Pipes” in the American Naturalist printed Jacob’s sketch of a bird pipe from a Wabash County mound; family papers say that a bird pipe he found is now in the American Museum of Natural History in New York.

The Smithsonian Institution holds five objects he gave in 1875, among them a large stone hoe recorded from Mount Carmel. H. D. Winters’s 1963 archaeological survey of the Wabash valley in Illinois draws on the material he removed from McCleary’s Bluff and on his descriptions of the Hanging Rock and Dunkel mound sites. In May 1903, at 59, he applied for a passport to travel abroad with his wife, planning to return about 15 November. The application does not say where they were going, but his obituary mentions an extensive tour of Europe “a few years ago”, which most likely refers to this trip.

Death

In December 1906 he went out to patients despite a chill, and a day later, at about two o’clock in the morning of Tuesday 18 December, he died of pneumonia at his home in Mount Carmel. The Mount Carmel Register called him the town’s best beloved citizen. His funeral was held at the Methodist Episcopal church on the afternoon of Thursday 20 December, with a Masonic service at the grave, and was probably the largest ever held in the town. He was buried at Rose Hill Cemetery, Mount Carmel, in the Schneck family mausoleum.

He was survived by his wife; his son Sereno W., a physician; his sister Mrs. Barbara Sanders of Grayville, Illinois; and his brothers Charles of Hot Springs, Arkansas, and Henry of New Harmony. The Botanical Gazette of 1907 noted his death as that of an old and well-known student of the flora of his region. Mary survived him by nearly fourteen years and died in 1920.

Notes

The county history of 1883 and his extended obituary in the Mount Carmel Register of 27 December 1906 tell the capture at Jackson, the failed exchange and the details of his navy service in the same terms, and agree on his enlistment date, age, company and regiment. The Illinois Roll of Honor of 1929 lists “Dr J Schneck” of Rose Hill Cemetery under “Co. E, 60 IN INF”; it is a state compilation from veterans’ grave registrations, not a service record. A naval enlistment return of May 1864, written at New York, lists him as “Jacob Schnack” at 21, born in Indiana. A navy pension index card confirms his naval service with the rank of landsman and records that his widow, Mary, later applied for a pension on it; it names the vessels Port Royal and Potomac and the receiving ship North Carolina, but not the Metacomet. A biographical note by Clark Kimberling puts his 1861 enlistment in Company E of the 16th Illinois Infantry rather than an Indiana regiment; both the Roll of Honor and the obituary say the 60th Indiana, so the note is contradicted.

For his parents, the county history gives John F. Schneck’s arrival in America in 1839 and his Lancaster marriage in January 1843; the 1880 census gives his birthplace as Württemberg, and Jacob stated under oath in 1903 that his father had become a naturalised citizen. Four later records give Elizabeth’s birthplace as France. The obituary dates John’s settling at Lancaster to 1843, which sits closely against Jacob’s birth near New Harmony in December 1843. The account of the family’s earlier origins, from Westphalia to Stuttgart, appears in both the county history and the obituary and has not been checked against other records.

The obituary gives his teachers as Dr. Goslin and Dr. Graham and his graduation as March 1871, and the Journal of the American Medical Association in its notice of his death gives 1871 too; the lack of money comes from the family papers. A collection of physicians’ biographies published in 1896 gives his graduation as 13 March 1871, and the family papers give 14 March. The census of June 1870 lists Dr. Graham as a physician and surgeon, and Schneck is listed at Mount Carmel as a physician in 1880 and 1900. The Journal names the Cairo division of the Big Four system and the Illinois Central Railroad and his medical memberships; the obituary names the Big Four and the Southern railroads.

The family papers, which draw on the obituary, the county history and a later article by the Wabash County historian, are the source for his church, lodge, politics and society memberships and for the museum finds, the destroyed mounds, the funeral and the cornerstone. His name appears as Schnack in the 1870 census and as Schnäck in 1850. A farm listed under the name Jacob Schneck at Mendota, La Salle County, Illinois, in the agricultural census of 1860 belonged to another man: this Jacob was sixteen at the time, his father had died three years before, and he enlisted from Indiana the following year.