Morris Donaldson 24^th Iowa, Co. G

Morris Donaldson was born in 1836 in Indiana. Little is known about his family, except the possibility that he was related to a James Donaldson, also of the 24^th Iowa. It is, however, known that he moved to Iowa and worked as a Billiard table keeper at the Kingston Hotel in Kingston City, Iowa.

He enlisted in the 24^th Iowa Volunteer Infantry Regiment on August 14, 1862 as a private, and mustered in on September 3, 1862, at the age of twenty-six. He did not live to see the end of the war, but instead died of disease on March 5, 1864 in a hospital in St. Louis, Missouri. Strangely enough, it was not wounds that killed so many men in the Civil War, it was the disease that was prevalent throughout the camps in both Northern and Southern regiments. His body was returned to Linn County, and he was buried in Linwood Cemetery in Addition (D), one of the oldest additions of the cemetery.