A unique collection of more than 150 letters written to an Ohio serviceman during the American Civil War offers glimpses of women's lives as they waited, worked, and wrote from the Ohio home front.

This unique collection of more than 150 letters written to an Ohio serviceman during the American Civil War offers glimpses of women's lives as they waited, worked, and wrote from the Ohio home front. The letters reveal fascinating details of the lives of mostly young, single women--friends, acquaintances, love interests, and strangers who responded to one Union soldier's advertisement for cor respondents. Almost all of the women who responded Lewis Lybarger's lonely-hearts newspaper advertisement lived in Ohio and supported the Union. Lybarger carried the collection of letters throughout three years of military service, preserved them through his life, and left them to be discovered in an attic trunk more than a century after Lee's surrender.