Thomas Monroe Coombs and His Family

by Neil Allen Bristow

Thomas Monroe Coombs was the eldest son of John D. Coombs (1807-1881) and Almira Oaks (1814-1858). He was born 18 Jan 1839 at his father's farm on Fox Creek in the rolling limestone hills of southern Anderson County, Kentucky, southwest of the Kentucky River, not far from Frankfort, in what is sometimes called the Outer Bluegrass.

Tom's great grandfather, John Coombs, had migrated in 1780 down the Ohio River to Nelson County, Kentucky in company with his in-laws, the Jolly family, and a dozen other families from Pennsylvania.¹ John died in Nelson County in 1801. His son, Asa Coombs (1770-1807), settled in what was then part of Franklin County, where he married (as a second wife) Zylpha Hackley (1775-1850), daughter of Francis Hackley and Fanny Lightfoot. The Hackleys had come to Kentucky from the Virginia Piedmont.

Tom's mother, Almira Oaks, was the daughter of Thomas Oaks and Catherine Cook, another Virginia family which had settled south of Lexington, in Jessamine County. When she died in her early forties, Almira left eight children, the youngest less than a year old. Her widowed husband, John, did not remarry, and one of the elder daughters, Beatrice, took charge of the younger children.

This family crisis may have impelled Tom, then in his late teens, to make his own way. He chose not to follow his forbears into farming. By age 21, he had moved to Williamstown in Grant County, midway between Georgetown and Covington. There, he came to the attention of a cousin, Squire Lucas (1810-1873), the Sheriff of Grant County, who named Tom as a deputy. The young lawman must have met with his boss' approval, because on 6 December 1860, Tom married Squire's daughter, Mary Louise Lucas (1840-1909). Lou, as she was known, was Tom's second cousin; they were both descendants of Francis Hackley and Fanny Lightfoot. A premature daughter was stillborn in June 1861. Eight other children followed over the next 17 years, and all but one survived infancy. His eldest son, born while Tom was (mistakenly) held in jail, was named for John Hunt Morgan, the dashing cavalry leader from Lexington, who was known as "the Thunderbolt of the Confederacy" and under whom Tom was to serve.²

Before he was caught up in the war, Tom was managing a store in Williamstown, while the owner, John Sheriff, was in Ireland.³ Retail commerce seemed to agree with Tom. Life on a farm, away from the hustle of business, held little attraction for him. He must have had an outgoing personality, which enabled him to make friends easily, wherever he went.

Certainly family connections were important, and Tom did not hesitate to avail himself of the far-flung web of kinship, but business connections also played a role in his safely traversing hundreds of miles of Federal-held territory after his escape from a Union guard in Cincinnati.⁴

Whatever role personality and luck played, Tom's experiences as a prisoner of war were far better than most of his contemporaries who fell into the hands of the enemy. Tom's months in confinement at Fort Delaware, spent in relative comfort with adequate food, were a far cry from the usual. Officers usually fared better than enlisted men, but Tom's experience was out of the ordinary. Other prisoners told of suffering starvation and brutality, and the fort on Pea Patch Island gained a fearsome reputation.⁵

When Tom returned to Kentucky after "taking the oath," he put the war behind him. He wanted to get on with his life. After a short time decompressing and socializing, he set about finding work in his chosen career. He writes not a word of Appomattox and the collapse of the Confederacy. The last entry in his diary (26 Aug 1865) records his going into business for himself. The great adventure was over, and he could settle down to his family and his career.

For the next fifteen years he did just that, until an early death claimed him on 26 Mar 1881 in Williamstown. Lou and the children returned to Covington, where his younger sister, Kate Almira, had married Julius Lucien Bristow five years earlier in 1876, and his youngest brother was to marry Julius' youngest sister, Statira Benning Bristow, in 1884. Another brother, John Leslie Coombs, had married Lou's sister, Queen Victoria Lucas, in 1874.⁶

Notes:

¹ W. H. Perrin, et al., History of Kentucky (Breckinridge County), 1065.

² See Diary entry for 10 Dec 1862.

³ See Diary introduction.

⁴ See Diary entries for Jan and Feb 1863.

⁵ Contrast the recollections of Captain John S. Swann, a Virginian who arrived at Fort Delaware just as Tom was leaving. For a broader view, see Lonnie R. Speer, who states in his fine history of Civil War prisons, "No other northern prison was as dreaded by the South." ... "The news of being sent there often caused 'faces to grow white' and 'hands to clench in fear.'" Portals to Hell: Military Prisons in the Civil War (Mechanicsburg, PA: Stackpole Books, 1999), 143.

⁶ To trace the sometimes tangled relationships, see the genealogy.

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