This is a love story — about a man and his cat.
Charles E. Porter, a gunner on the CSS Neuse, penned a letter on March 8, 1864 to his future wife in Virginia. Virgilia Adelaide Boatwright was soon to know that Porter’s heart was taken by another.
It was, by the account, a rather large feline.
“Oh, I forgot to tell you since I have been here I’ve become engaged to a little Tar Heel girl. Her name is Miss Cathy Couber Grubble,” said Morris Bass, CSS Neuse Interpretive Center and Gov. Richard Caswell Memorial operations manager, reading from the letter. “Don’t you think it is a handsome name? And she is as handsome as her name is. But let me describe her to you.
“She is about 3 feet 8 inches high, with beautiful red hair and has the most magnificent eyes you ever saw. They are fine gray eyes, about such eyes as Fannie’s cat has got. You know how I admire cats as above all others. Well, this is my Tar Heel sweetheart. Now, don’t say that I don’t have a sweetheart too.”
Porter, originally from Dover, Del., first enlisted in the Confederate navy in Virginia in 1861 as an acting gunner, before moving on to the 2nd Fluvanna Battery (Va.) in 1862, and rejoining the navy in 1863, according to information available from his descendant who compiled the information, Dr. James A. Porter III.
James Porter compiled copies of Charles’ letters from an archive at the Central Rappahannock Heritage Center in Fredericksburg, Va. He also transcribed the letters and included them in a book. The Neuse Center has a copy of the book, which was printed for friends, family and a few others, according to site interpreter Holly Brown.
She believes the cat may have been more of a pet than work animal.
“I think, in this case, he really got it for a pet,” Brown said. “He said the reason why Richard Bacot — who drew a picture of the cat on the casemate of the CSS Neuse in his log book — drew it for Charles Porter to send home. He thought very fondly of the cat, and it was more his, rather than the ship’s, cat. So, it’s a little bit different than what we had thought.”
Bacot, a second lieutenant from South Carolina, was the ship’s executive officer at the time.
The romance with Miss Cathy was short-lived. Bass said Porter wrote on a Sunday afternoon in June 1864, “I have not seen my Tar Heel for some time. And I don’t care much if I never see her anymore.”
While Porter and the Neuse may have lost their cat, having felines onboard was not unusual among river-going vessels.
“They were used onboard not only as mascots, but also for the fact they killed the rats and the mice that get onboard sometimes,” Bass said. “As a matter of fact, when the USS Monitor went down, they had a cat onboard there. That was 12 miles off of Hatteras is where she went down in December of 1862. There’s an account of the cat wailing and screaming during that nor’easter when the ship was going down.”
Following the destruction of the Neuse ahead of advancing Federal troops, Charles Porter went elsewhere. James Porter has his ancestor on the CSS Richmond as the city itself fell to Union forces. After the war, Charles Porter married his “darling Gillie” in 1866 and went on to become an auditor with the Chesapeake and Ohio Railroad. Following his wife’s death in 1899, he remarried in 1901 and died in Lynchburg, Va. in 1908. He’s buried at historic Hollywood Cemetery in Richmond.
The cat’s whereabouts after she left the still-incomplete Neuse in 1864 are unknown.
In addition to research on the ship, the Neuse Center is in the process of seeking any photography of Kinston from the Civil War period to 1900. If you possess or are aware of any photographs, the staff encourages residents to call the center to 252-522-2107.
Wes Wolfe can be reached at 252-559-1075 or wes.wolfe@kinston.com. Follow him on Twitter at WolfeReports.