The first wife of noted Civil War and frontier cavalry officer Albert Barnitz, 23-year-old Eva Prouty Barnitz died giving birth to their first child, an infant daughter whose life was lost along with her mother's. Known as "Little Eva", Mrs. Barnitz was the daughter of James and Mary Prouty of Mentor, Ohio. She had met her future husband when he was a student at nearby Cleveland Law School, and after a passionate courtship, married him in late 1859. The pair made an attractive, romantic couple: she was a petite, red-haired beauty, and he a tall, blond, handsome youth who had subsidized his law studies as a minor poet, matinee idol, and instructor in elocution. In the summer of 1860 the newlyweds moved to St. Paul, Minnesota, where Mrs. Barnitz, by that time an expectant mother, had relatives. The Barnitz' happy marriage was cut short, however, by her death in childbirth less than a year later. The young widower, devastated by the loss of his wife and child, brought their bodies home to Ohio, where they were interred here in his in-laws' family plot. With the outbreak of the Civil War soon afterward, he enlisted in the Union Cavalry, subsequently embarking on the military career that would bring him acclaim. After the war he married Jennie Platt of Cincinnati, by whom he had three more daughters, and was buried with honors in Arlington National Cemetery after his own death in 1912.
The first wife of noted Civil War and frontier cavalry officer Albert Barnitz, 23-year-old Eva Prouty Barnitz died giving birth to their first child, an infant daughter whose life was lost along with her mother's. Known as "Little Eva", Mrs. Barnitz was the daughter of James and Mary Prouty of Mentor, Ohio. She had met her future husband when he was a student at nearby Cleveland Law School, and after a passionate courtship, married him in late 1859. The pair made an attractive, romantic couple: she was a petite, red-haired beauty, and he a tall, blond, handsome youth who had subsidized his law studies as a minor poet, matinee idol, and instructor in elocution. In the summer of 1860 the newlyweds moved to St. Paul, Minnesota, where Mrs. Barnitz, by that time an expectant mother, had relatives. The Barnitz' happy marriage was cut short, however, by her death in childbirth less than a year later. The young widower, devastated by the loss of his wife and child, brought their bodies home to Ohio, where they were interred here in his in-laws' family plot. With the outbreak of the Civil War soon afterward, he enlisted in the Union Cavalry, subsequently embarking on the military career that would bring him acclaim. After the war he married Jennie Platt of Cincinnati, by whom he had three more daughters, and was buried with honors in Arlington National Cemetery after his own death in 1912.
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