Back to the Table of Contents Page

Back to the Weekly Home Page

Classifieds

Publication Date: Friday, August 24, 2001

Farewell, Gen. Pleasonton

Gen. Pleasonton is hanging up his saber.

Our city's namesake has attended downtown events for the last 13 years in the person of Ormond Eckley, Civil War buff and re-enactor. But now, due to arthritis in his back, Eckley, 76, is retiring the part and donating his general's uniform to the Amador-Livermore Valley Historical Museum.

"I've given it up reluctantly," said Eckley. One of his last gigs was the downtown Christmas parade in 1999. "When I do something like that, I pay for it in pain," he said. "It's pretty taxing."

Our city was named after Civil War hero Maj. Gen. Alfred Pleasonton, who was a friend of city founder John Kottinger. A postal clerk in Washington, D.C., made the error in the spelling and so it remained.

To honor the general - and to stage a fun event on Main Street - Pat Lane, executive director for the Pleasanton Downtown Association, threw him a birthday bash in 1988 and asked her friend Eckley, a Civil War buff, to play the role.

He remembered telling Lane at the time: "I'm not the kind who would just put on some kind of a quick getup. If I'm going to give you Gen. Pleasonton, I'm going to give you Gen. Pleasonton, and I'm going to continue to do it for the city of Pleasanton."

And so he has. "We've done anything that's been on Main Street from 1988 on," he said. His wife, Bev, puts on her hoop skirts and becomes Laura Pleasonton, the general's sister, who never married and is buried next to him in the family plot in the Congressional Cemetery in Washington.

Eckley pointed out similarities between himself and the general. They were both born in '24, although 100 years apart. Their heights and weights were similar, and both sported facial hair, although the general was "better thatched," as Eckley puts it.

"I'm actually an informal student of the Civil War, not a formal historian," said Eckley. But this "student" owns 500 hardbound volumes on the war, has gone on four extensive tours of battlefield sites, and has been active in living history for 23 years.

"In the mid-'70s I became quite interested in reading about the Civil War. Of course one book leads to another, and another, and another... It's an incurable disease," he said.

As a Civil War re-enactor, Eckley portrays a Confederate, a member of the 1st South Carolina Sharpshooters in the Army of Northern Virginia.

"My attitude is I'm a historian, not a partisan, and someone asked me to join a Confederate unit," he said. "I don't see why I can't tell the story of the south."

California might have become a Confederate state, Eckley noted. "The Central Valley was very, very pro-Southern," he said. "A great many Southerners came west, seeking to own land. They brought Southern ideals and training."

He said that a coup d'etat was planned in 1861 and a Confederate Stars and Bars flag was prepared to hang in Sacramento. "The Lincoln administration moved quickly and galvanized California into the Union just days before the Civil War started."

Eckley said that Gen. Pleasonton's main contribution to the Civil War was his organization of the cavalry. The Southern cavalrymen were legendary for their work with horses, but they were now fighting on the other side. "He worked with getting horses of better quality and working with the soldiers to take care of the horses. He brought the quality of the cavalry up to par."

Pleasonton was the youngest of the seven children of Stephen Pleasonton, a civilian hero of the War of 1812. "When the British were burning Washington, Stephen got hold of the Declaration of Independence ... and spirited it out into the environs of Virginia for safekeeping until the British were gone," Eckley recounted.

Congress recognized his heroics with a burial plot in the Congressional Cemetery and by educating his children. Alfred attended West Point, graduating seventh in his class of 25 in 1844. "This requires quite a deal by way of deportment," said Eckley. "There was a draconian system of demerits, so Pleasonton, we can assume, was not only good at the books but spit and polished."

His first military involvement came soon after graduation. "By 1846 he was with Zachary Taylor, who was taking the U.S. Army across the Rio Grande for the war with Mexico." During this time he met John Kottinger, a brother cavalryman. "They were close friends from that time forward," said Eckley. "They traveled down to Mexico and there was a lot of fighting. Times like that develop real friendships."

After the war, Kottinger joined his brother in California. In 1853 Pleasonton was assigned to the U.S. Army Benicia Arsenal so they were able to keep up their friendship. He also spent some time at the Presidio.

Eckley's research has given him an image of the general: "He had a high sense of duty, good judgment; he was a born leader. He was also very outgoing and jovial. And he was well-respected by his men."

His brother Augustus Pleasonton also served in the Civil War, as a brigadier general, in charge of supplying food for the U.S. Army.

As a re-enactor, Eckley became interested in his own genealogy and found that his family came ashore in Massachusetts in the 1600s. His great-grandfather Ephraim R. Eckley was a colonel in the Union Army. Bev's grandfather also fought for the North.

But at least some Eckleys moved to the Northwest and Ormond was born in Vancouver. He immigrated to the United States after serving in World War II, and it was while studying U.S. history for his naturalization test that he "became quite intrigued with the history of my wonderful new country."

He first settled in Oregon then moved to the Bay Area and worked in Oakland in the manufacturing end of the ice cream trade. He and Bev moved to Livermore in 1976, where they became active in the Amador-Livermore Symphony.

His first foray into the world of living history was in 1978 as a skirmisher. "A skirmisher is a member of a shooting club, who shoots at targets with Civil War weapons, the old muskets," he explained. "We do it in uniform, and have various living history events and are in parades."

He also founded the Tri-Valley Roundtable, which is open to anyone who is interested in the Civil War, and after 1988 he joined the ranks of re-enactors.

"In 1988 I'd say there were 20,000 re-enactors. Then a 1990 series on PBS called 'The Civil War' by Ken Burns caught the imagination and attention of everyone in the United States," he remembered. Then the film "Gettysburg," which used 5,000 re-enactors, was released in 1993.

"I would hazard a guess of 50,000 re-enactors now. Civil War re-enacting has become a great pastime of America," Eckley said. "Re-enactors all take it very seriously. We work on it 24/7 in our minds."

Gen. Pleasonton and Laura have also visited schools, making presentations on the Civil War.

"I will take them out to the battlefield and talk about the gore and the grime and how you're going to treat the wounds," he said. Once he was graphically describing how a saber was used in a cavalry charge when he noticed a young girl turning blue. He toned down his delivery after that.

Students are interested in Laura's voluminous dresses. They can take up to 27 yards of material, weigh 25-45 pounds, and if she doesn't have on hoops, she wears 10 to 12 petticoats.

"At age 6, they ask you if you were in the Civil War. But ages 10-11, that's where you get the greatest interest," Eckley said.

"You're going to get oddball questions, designed to trip you up. You'd better have done your homework," he added. "I live for those moments."

Adults often ask what the Civil War has to do with California. Quite a bit, he answers - 26.8 percent of the Union debt was paid for by California gold and the state furnished troops. Fort Point in San Francisco was rushed to completion before the Civil War and was occupied for the duration.

Re-enactors work hard to keep history accurate. "There are a lot of fables, lots of legends about the war," said Eckley. The re-enactors help to get things right when they appear in movies, and Eckley said the filmmakers are very receptive. Instead of paying the re-enactors, they contribute to battlefield preservation.

And what about the mistake in spelling our city's name? "Well, if they had spelled it right, everyone else would have spelled it wrong," said Eckley.

The biggest misconception is that the war was fought over slavery. "It was an exacerbating issue but the principal cause was states rights," he said. "Lincoln said at the beginning that the war was over nothing more than secession. After about one year, in 1962, he decided he'd better make it a more humanistic thing."

People also ask why he is so interested in the Civil War. He quotes Southern author Shelby Foote: "In order to understand America and appreciate it, you've got to understand the American Civil War."

"You're not just going to study the battles. The interesting thing about any section of history is not just what happened but the people involved," Eckley said.

"The American Civil War was the first war in the history of the mankind where soldiers on both sides knew how to read and write," he noted. People are still unearthing letters and diaries from their attics and finding them at garage sales, he said, and 250 new titles and volumes on the war are published annually, not to mention reprints and magazines.

Pleasanton was originally named Alisal. City father Joshua Neal wanted to give the town another name in 1867, said Eckley, but the post office was on the property of John Kottinger, who was "in a small feud" with Neal. "Kottinger talked with his brother and they said they would rename it Pleasonton," he said, after consulting the general himself.

Although he has no written proof, Eckley feels sure that the retired general visited the town after it assumed his name. "After 1868 he resigned from the Army and took a position with the Indiana-Ohio railroad," said Eckley, pointing out that this would have allowed him to travel free on any railroad line, and the railroads extended out to Pleasanton.

Gen. Pleasonton died in 1897 of throat cancer, which Eckley conjectured could have been caused by smoking cigars. "Pleasonton won two cavalry battles of the Civil War. Moneyed people would buy large quantities of cigars and probably kept him supplied for the rest of his life," he said.

"Another curious thing, he didn't like going to the doctor and always used holistic medicine for healing. Once he had surgery performed upon him and he let them open him up and sew him closed without the benefit of anesthetics."

"Pleasanton is lucky to be named after a famous general of the Civil War," Eckley said. "I only know of two communities named after Grant. That ain't shabby."

Pleasanton, Kan., was also named for the general, after his decisive victory in the Battle of Mine Creek. As in our case, a postal clerk misspelled the name. There are other towns across the country named Pleasanton, but with no connection to the general - and they are probably spelled as intended.

Although we will no longer see Eckley as Gen. Pleasonton on Main Street, he maintains his enthusiasm for the war between the states. "I'm not out of re-enacting, just inactive. Now I stay in camp," he said. And he has another Union general suit he is keeping for sentimental reasons. "Maybe I'll wear it on a cold day," he said.

Pat Lane is sad that Eckley's years as the general are ending, but grateful. "He fit the picture," she said, "and I've always been proud of what he did for Pleasanton."

Farewell, Gen. Pleasonton.