Civil War Veterans in Australia

Henry Brown was born in 1845 in the city of Darmstadt, Hesse, Germany and was born Gustavus Loehr, son of Lawrence Loehr, a teacher employed by Frederick Krupps, the founder of steel and armaments industry in Germany and mother Marguerite. Krupps sent Lawrence to Oxford to further his studies and Lawrence was married in England and went back to Germany. When the Franco-Prussian war broke out Loehr and his family fled to America. A brother of Henry Brown Gustavus was killed in the San Francisco earthquake, and a daughter is supposed to have become famous as a singer at the Metropolitan Opera House in New York.

Gustavus (or Brown) is said to have joined the Union during the Civil War at age about sixteen years of age and served on Union gunboats as a ships cook. After the war he was on an American gunboat that was cruising the South Seas, and when the ship made port at Eden, Australia supposedly aboard the “Albert”. Gustavus and his friend jumped ship and deserted; changing his name to Henry Brown. His friends name was Pruss, a very early German pioneer of Bega. Henry Brown was about 20 years old when he arrived in Australia and he and Pruss set up a coach building factory in Bega; Pruss teaching Henry blacksmithing, which he went on to perfect. Henry was a noted blacksmith and several of his gates and iron-mongery are still extant in Bega.

Henry Brown was Prussian in manner, cold, and efficient. He was a barrel-chested man, short of stature with black hair and beard and sharp brown eyes and had a great love of horses and racing. He maintained his American nationality and always celebrated the 4^th of July with a tremendous firing of guns, letting off of detonators and heavy drinking. He had a magnificent bass baritone voice and sang every Sunday in the little Anglican church in Bega.

Henry Brown married Catherine Moon in Bega in 1871. Catherine was a sweet gentle lady, fair with grey-blue eyes like her Scottish grandmother, and always had a gentle smile at everyone’s beck and call, and was a respected midwife. Henry and Catherine had ten children, all born in Bega; Margaret J. born in 1872, Laurence Frederick born in 1874, Henry L. born in 1875, William L. born in 1877, Charles Edward born in 1880, Robert W. born in 1882, Ethel E. born in 1884, Bertha C. born in 1888, Stanley H. born in 1890 and died in1895 and Kenneth G. A. born in 1892.

Henry Brown died on December 11, 1899, at age 53, of a heart attack; certificate number 12247. He was buried in the old Bega Cemetery, which is now situated under the present day Bega High School. An act of the New South Wales parliament was needed to re-use the old cemetery, after a new cemetery was developed further out of town in 1904. The old cemetery was closed because of its proximity to the centre of town, and several typhoid and other disease outbreaks, which were blamed by local doctors on the ‘run-off’ from the cemetery into household water sources; like wells in the peoples backyards.

In the book of transcription of monuments in the new Bega Cemetery, Henry Brown’s gravestone with that of his wife, who died in 1925, and his sons Kenneth who was killed in action in France in 1917 and Stanley, aged 4 who died in 1895, were all found. It is suspected that Henry however, is still buried under the school and when his wife died all the other names were simply added to her gravestone. Burials were still made in the old cemetery until the 1930’s; if a partner or family plot was there, so it is interesting that Catherine didn’t get buried there with him. He may have been retrieved, as some families did that, but there is no record yet as to who was ‘replaced’ in the new cemetery. Some of the headstones of the pioneers were retrieved from the bull dozer who flattened the old area, but not everyone. I have been told there are some very nice granite and marble footpaths in older gardens around Bega, that are souvenirs from the old graveyard. It appears Henry Brown is the only American Civil War veteran buried in Australia where a public building substitutes for his headstone.

A son of Henry Brown also became a well-known blacksmith, and lived to well over 100 years of age. A photograph of his 100^th birthday in Goulburn, where his daughter lived, is in the Bega Historical Society collection. Another of his sons became a Municipal Councillor and Mayor of Bega for a period.