Cheryl Wilkinson
Published: 2008
Total Pages: 212
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Previous historical scholarship argues that the vast majority of Union veterans who entered the National Home for Disabled Volunteer Soldiers (NHDVS) were poor and did so only as an alternative to the poorhouse. Until recently, it also claimed that the branches of NHDVS received continuous support from their host communities, with the corollary that the branches became integral parts of those communities. However, the existing body of scholarship has focused on the NHDVS only during the nineteenth century and has not fully examined the evolution of the institution into the early twentieth century. Further, scholars have not examined the history of the NHDVS' Southern California branch. This thesis extends the exploration of the NHDVS into the twentieth century and to its west coast branch. By doing so, it reveals a significant Civil War veteran presence in Southern California as well as changing expectations about the nature of the federal benefits granted to Union veterans. This research explores the efforts of Santa Monica elites to secure the NHDVS for their area as a source of jobs, a market for local goods and services, and as a supply of pension dollars that it anticipated would be spent by its residents. When the behavior of residents of the Pacific Branch affected Santa Monica in ways those elites had not anticipated, they sought ways to segregate the Pacific Branch members from their city. That goal, combined with Southern California's drive to develop its vast expanses of vacant land, led to a real estate project that specifically targeted pensioned Union veterans, especially those who lived at the Pacific Branch. The project attracted not only Pacific Branch residents, but also an important group of Union veterans who were neither destitute nor willing to leave their families. Instead, those veterans used their Pacific Branch benefits as part of their retirement plans in order to live as productive members of the community outside the Soldiers' Home well into old age.
