The soldiers also needed a place to be with other survivors of the terrible battles, a place where they could continue the friendship forged during the war. Groups of men began joining together, first for companionship, then for political power, according to the website.
The Grand Army of the Republic, known as the GAR, became one of the largest and most powerful of these groups. By 1890, more than 400,000 veterans had joined.
The community units were called posts and, at its height, the GAR had more than 8,000 posts throughout the country. They were often named to honor a deceased veteran; for instance, the post formed in Glendale in 1894 was named for a Union general, N.P. Banks.
Now, here is the connection with Glendale. Before the Civil War, a 16-year-old boy named Henry Mingay and his family were living in Saratoga Springs, N.Y. Mingay was apprenticed to a printer, and the story is that when he heard the news that Fort Sumter had been fired upon, he left the print shop and enlisted in the Union forces. He served for 10 months with the ‘‘Fighting 69th,’’ which used an Irish shamrock as its badge, according to the Glendale News-Press, Dec. 4, 1945.
After the war, Mingay returned to the Saratoga Springs print shop, then he went into newspaper work on his own. He was one of the first to join the newly formed GAR, according to the newspaper account.
Later, he went to Colorado. There, he bought two newspapers, one in Canyon City and another in Florence. He joined a post in Canyon City, then made his way to California where he joined a Monrovia post.
