Lucie Nicholson: A Mighty Pretty Girl

   Born in Maryland 1827, Lucie Nicholson came to Missouri with her family in the mid-1830s and settled in Cooper County a few miles from Boonville. As a young woman, Lucie was known as “the belle of Boonville” and “a mighty pretty girl.” Shortly before the Civil War, she became engaged to David Herndon Lindsay, a recent widower and principal of the Saline Female Institute in Miami, Missouri, but the couple decided to postpone the wedding because of the unsettled state of the country.
   From the very beginning of the war, Lucie was active in support of the Southern cause. After the Battle of Boonville in June 1861, she set up a field hospital near her hometown and tended to the needs of the wounded Southern soldiers. Shortly after the fight at Boonville, David Lindsay, Lucie’s fiancé, joined Price’s army, and he was later commissioned a major.
   In the fall of 1861, Lucie traveled to Osceola to rendezvous with General Sterling Price, bringing morphine and other drugs. She then accompanied his army to Springfield, where she and other young women sewed clothing for the soldiers. In early 1862, Lucie headed back to Cooper County, where she was arrested and held prisoner for eight weeks.
   After her release in the spring of 1862, Lucie taught school near Rocheport in Boone County. She was still there when she wrote a letter to her sister Gettie (Gertrude) on April 25, 1863, which would land her in a heap of trouble. Lucie expressed strong Confederate sympathies and told her sister of her service to Price’s army.
   She assured Gettie she was being very careful so as not to get their mother in trouble, but almost immediately after writing the letter, Lucie made a terrible blunder. Very near the time she wrote her letter to Gettie, she also wrote to a Boone County resident held prisoner at Gratiot Street Prison in St. Louis, and she inadvertently placed each letter in the wrong envelope. Gettie’s letter, mailed to the prisoner, was intercepted by Union authorities in St. Louis, and Lucie was arrested because of its contents. She was brought to St,. Louis and lodged the Gratiot Street Prison in early May.
   Charged with being “a volunteer in the rebel army,” Lucie was interrogated on May 5. She readily admitted that she had written the letter in question, and she further admitted helping Price’s army in the fall of 1861. A few days later, Lucie was transferred to Chestnut Street Female Prison. On May 13, she and ten other women were put aboard the Belle Memphis steamship and sent down the Mississippi River, banished to the South. In an article announcing the banishments, a St. Louis newspaper reprinted Lucie’s letter to her sister.
   In Arkansas, Lucie rendezvoused with Major Lindsay, and they were married on July 22, 1863. Lucie remained in the South throughout the rest of the war. When the conflict ended, she and her husband went to his native state of Kentucky, and Lindsay resumed his career as a schoolmaster. In 1876, the couple returned to Missouri and settled in Clinton County, where Lindsay was a prominent citizen for many years. After his death in 1902, Lucie lived with her daughter for several years. About 1912, she gave an interview to a woman who was collecting stories of Missouri women during the Civil War for the Daughters of the Confederacy. Around 1920, Lucie moved to St. Louis to stay with her sisters, and in 1923, the sisters’ house caught fire. One of Lucie’s sisters perished in the blaze, and Lucie, now ninety-five, died at a hospital a few hours later from her burns. Lucie’s body was taken back to Clinton County and buried in the Lathrop Cemetery beside her deceased husband.
   This post is a greatly condensed version of a chapter in my latest book, Lady Rebels of Civil War Missouri.