[Susan (Mangold) Barnum.]

In 1860, Susan Mangold was living in the household of her brother Benjamin Franklin Mangold. After the remarriage of her father, only a year after her mother Catherine Gunnell died, she left home. Apparently there was some conflict between the children and their step-mother. Susan and Emily were only 13 and 11 at the time. She must have occupied her time caring for her nephews and nieces, from both sister Emily and brother Frank's families. In 1855, Miles J. Barnum had come to Anna, Illinois with his brother and father, looking for work as a carpenter. He probably worked in local saw mills as an engineer, during the boom in southern Illinois in the 1850s. No doubt he found Miss Mangold quite attractive. It is possible he met her through working for B. F. Mangold, as he was a builder. Susan Mangold waited a total of ten years to marry her beau, first for Miles to make something of himself as a young man and then for him to return from the Union Army. None of their civil war letters survive.

Susan Mangold, at age twenty-one, was among the twenty-seven charter members, who in December of 1858 had been granted letters from the Jonesboro Baptist Church for the purpose of "being organized into a Baptist Church at Anna, Union County, Illinois." Susan's step-mother Anna E. Mangold and step-sister Sara I. Maginnis along with an unidentified "Thon Mangold" were charter members, as was leading citizen D. L. Phillips. The First Baptist Church of Anna, from the time of its organization on 15 January 1859, met in the schoolhouse, which was located on the site of the Davie School. In 1868, a frame building was constructed, becoming the church’s first house of worship.

Susan is wearing black netted lace "mitts", which were very popular in the 1840s and 1850s and generally were still worn in the 1860s, mainly by much older women. It seems there were a few scattered brief revivals of this fashion among young women during the war years, but they don't appear to have been as universally popular as in earlier decades. Women's magazines and surviving examples show they were invariably black.

Carte de visite on albumen paper, circa 1864 (1860s card style), Imprint: City Gallery J. G. Mangold, Prop'r DuQuoin, Ill. South-East cor. Main & Division Sts. Neg. No. 2034 [AJB:3]