Memorial Day: Tracking down a living relative of the ‘Old Soldier’

It’s hard to remember the things you were never told.

“All of this information is totally new to me,” Mike Miner told me last week when I called to introduce myself and tell him about the Memorial Day story that I was working on.

Miner, who grew up in Eugene, graduating from Churchill High School in 1972, said he’d never heard of Army Cpl. Louis Renninger, let alone anything about his being one of only four American Civil War veterans buried in Oregon who received the Congressional Medal of Honor, the nation’s highest military honor.

When I told him I thought he was Renninger’s great-great-grandson, Miner was even more baffled, although the surname Renninger was familiar to him. (His paternal grandmother’s maiden name was Renninger.)

Cpl. Renninger was buried in the Eugene Pioneer Cemetery in 1908. And as always, he will be honored on this Memorial Day, May 26, 2025 — which also happens to be Miner’s 71st birthday — along with the other 145 or so Civil War veterans buried in one of Eugene’s oldest cemeteries.

After all, Memorial Day was first observed nationally in 1868 as “Decoration Day” to honor and remember the Union soldiers who had died in the War Between the States.

Renninger has been honored on the Eugene Pioneer Cemetery’s website for years, but I had never heard of him, either.

Curious, I visited and found his grave. His wife, Elizabeth Mann Renninger, who died at age 92 in Eugene in 1935, is buried next to him. They share a headstone.

Maude Renninger, one of their nine children, who died young, either 29 or 31, depending on whether the date on the headstone (born 1886) or a 1916 newspaper obituary (born 1884) is correct, is in the same plot.

Next, I entered “Louis Renninger” in the search bar at Newspapers.com and found stories in the Nov. 19, 1908, editions of the Morning Register and the Eugene Daily Guard.

“Old Soldier Passes Away — Louis Renninger is Found Cold in Death,” reads the top-of-the-front-page headline in the Register. He was 67 and dropped dead while feeding chickens at his son’s barn in Marcola on Nov. 17, 1908, from heart failure. He was a member of the J.W. Geary Post No. 7, a Grand Army of the Republic (GAR) fraternal organization of Civil War Union vets, in Eugene.

I also found a small item in the Aug. 7, 1894, edition of the Dayton (Ohio) Herald: “Another Ohio veteran has been given a medal by President Cleveland for meritorious conduct before Vicksburg. That honored veteran is Louis Renninger of the 37^th O.V.I.”

The 37^th Ohio Volunteer Infantry Regiment was one of three Ohio Civil War regiments consisting of German immigrants, according to Randy Fletcher’s “Hidden History of Civil War Oregon.” 

The Eugene Pioneer Cemetery’s website says Renninger was one of 150 Union soldiers who, on May 22, 1863, volunteered to lead an assault on the Confederate heights at the Battle of Vicksburg, Mississippi.

“The plan was for the volunteer storming party to build a bridge across a moat and plant scaling ladders against the enemy embankment in advance of the main attack.

“The volunteers knew the odds were against survival, and the mission was called a ‘forlorn hope’ in 19th-century vernacular. Only single men were accepted as volunteers and even then, twice as many men as needed came forward and were turned away. The assault began in the early morning following a naval bombardment and it was a failure.

“The Union soldiers came under enemy fire immediately and were pinned down in the ditch they were to cross. Despite repeated attacks by the main Union body under the command of Gen. Ulysses S. Grant, the men of the forlorn hope were unable to retreat until nightfall.”

About half of them were killed, the rest, including Renninger, were injured. Renninger sustained a shoulder and eye injury that led to his transfer to the Veteran Reserve Corps, a branch of the Army where disabled soldiers performed light duty while recovering from their wounds. He never fought in the war again and was discharged in 1864, according to Fletcher’s book.

Sifting through Miner details

I began to wonder if he had any living relatives in Lane County. My search led me to a March 28, 1948, story in the Eugene Register-Guard, about the death of John Louis Renninger, 82, of Coburg, whose wife was Irene Spores Renninger, the daughter of Jacob Spores, one of the earliest settlers in Coburg.

Louis Renninger’s entry on FindAGrave.com lists John Louis Renninger as his son. The R-G story about the son’s death listed Mary E. Miner, of Coburg, as one of two surviving daughters, and John Dale Miner, of Coburg, as one of two surviving grandsons.

Mary Elizabeth Renninger Moe is listed among John Louis Renninger’s children on FindAGrave.com. She was born in Marcola in 1905 and died in Port Angeles, Washington, at age 99 in 2005.

I Googled “Mary Elizabeth Renninger Moe obituary” and found a listing for a Mary Moe at GenLookups.com under the “Washington Obituary and Death Notice Archive.” It said she was survived by son John Dale Miner of Eugene, three grandchildren and four great-grandchildren.

A search for John Dale Miner in Eugene on Intellius.com, the public records search website, said he is 99 and listed several relatives with the surname Miner, including Diane, Michael, Kirby, Chase, Delanie, Tamara and Tracey.

Further searching John Dale Miner in Eugene turned up nothing, but when I searched for “Diane Miner obituary,” I found a Register-Guard obit at Legacy.com for Diane Beairsto Miner, who died in 2016 in Eugene at age 87. She graduated from Eugene High School in 1947 and in 1948 married John Miner. Survivors include sons Mike Miner and Kirby Miner and grandchildren Kyle, Kailey, Chase and Delanie.

It said she was predeceased by husband John Miner (he died a decade ago at 89, according to his son) and daughter Tamara Miner.

Searching online for John and Diane’s sons and grandchildren led me to a place of employment for Kailey Miner, 35, in Junction City.

I called, and someone put her on the phone. She’d never heard of Louis Renninger or anyone in the family named Mary, but she was happy to give me her father’s phone number.

And that’s how I reached Mike Miner at Good Samaritan Society — Eugene Village in south Eugene. Mike Miner has lived there for the past three years while undergoing rehabilitation for a gruesome broken leg injury, followed by a heart attack, all of that happening 30 years after he became an incomplete quadriplegic in a 1990 boating accident in Reno, Nevada.

And that’s also how Miner, his daughter, Tiffany, and I found ourselves with Eugene Pioneer Cemetery board members and volunteers in front of Louis Renninger’s grave on May 22, 2025. It happened to be 162 years to the day since his heroic actions that led to his becoming one of 1,522 Civil War soldiers, out of 2.75 million men who fought in the war, to receive the Medal of Honor.

According to the Congressional Medal of Honor Society, a nonprofit dedicated to preserving the stories of recipients, 3,547 individuals, all men except for a single Civil War nurse, have received the honor either posthumously or while alive, from the Civil War to the Global War on Terrorism (Afghanistan).

I couldn’t find anyone who had a photograph of Renninger, although what looks to be a doctored photo of a Civil War soldier appears on his FindAGrave.com page.

It’s unknown whether Renninger ever received his medal in person or by mail  — or where it might be today.

“I know other Medal of Honor recipients that were sort of in that same era, who received theirs in the mail, with nothing more than a letter and the medal,” said Fletcher, of Junction City, a longtime Civil War historian, who met with us at the cemetery.

“But he obviously knew, because it’s engraved right here on the side of his tombstone,” said Fletcher, who has a chapter in the book titled “A Forlorn Hope,” about Renninger’s fateful day. 

Indeed, carved into the side of the Renninger’s tombstone is a depiction of the Army’s Medal of Honor and the words, “The Congress to Corp. Louis Renninger Co. H 37 Ohio Vols for Gallantry at Vicksburg Miss, May 22, 1863.”

Westward bound

Fletcher and Dorothy Brandner, a cemetery board member as well as its historian, believe the Renningers’ tombstone is probably from 1935, when Elizabeth Mann Renninger died.

According to her obituary in the Dec. 24, 1935, Eugene Register-Guard, she was born in Mainz, Germany, in 1843 and came to Chicago with her family at age 7. It says she married Louis Renninger in October 1865, the same month their first child, John, was born in Ionia, Michigan, about 40 miles east of Grand Rapids.

They apparently lived and farmed in that area for about 25 years before moving to the Marcola area in the early 1890s. Elizabeth Renninger’s obituary says they came to Oregon on Jan. 1, 1891.

An item in the Jan. 3, 1836, Albany Democrat-Herald, where H.A. Renninger was a Linn County commissioner, said they came to Oregon in 1892, a year after H.A. had moved here.

So it would seem that Louis Renninger had been in Oregon at least a couple of years when President Grover Cleveland awarded his medal in August 1894.

Did he travel by train to receive it in Ohio or Washington, D.C. that summer?

Another news item, in the March 21, 1895, Cincinnati Enquirer, would indicate maybe not.

“Medals for Many War Veterans Are in the Possession of Adjutant-General Howe, at Columbus,” it reads. 

Renninger is listed in the story among those veterans of the 37^th OVI regiment “entitled to veteran medals.”

Miner asked Fletcher if all survivors of the events of May 22, 1863, in Vicksburg, Mississippi, received the Medal of Honor?

Yes, Fletcher said, 78 of them, largely because of the Grand Army of the Republic.

“They did a lot of the writing of the history of the war,” Fletcher said. “The winners get to write the history, that’s the way it goes. And most of the presidents in the final decades of the 19^th century fought for the Union in the war, he said.

The Grand Army of the Republic examined individual acts of heroism and congressional committees held hearings to scrutinize acts of valor, according to Fletcher.

Almost 700 Medals of Honor, out of the 1,522 bestowed, were awarded in the 1890s, Fletcher writes in his book.

‘The man who saved the cemetery’

If not for Renninger’s burial in Eugene Pioneer Cemetery, the graves of many who rest there may have been forever altered, Brandner said.

She referred to him as “the man who saved the cemetery.” The University of Oregon tried for years to acquire some of the cemetery’s land on the north side of its 16 acres for new classrooms, which would have involved relocating about 1,100 of the 4,000 or so souls buried there, Brandner said.

I found a 1963 Eugene Register-Guard story that said the legal battle began in 1957 when the Eugene Pioneer Cemetery Association, the cemetery’s volunteer caretakers (most of whom have ancestors buried there) since 1930, sued the owners, the Pioneer Memorial Park Association, which won control of the cemetery in 1961 because of an Oregon Supreme Court decision.

The Eugene Pioneer Cemetery Association alleged fraud when the cemetery’s original owners, the Eugene chapter of the Independent Order of Odd Fellows, which bought the land in 1873, granted the cemetery’s deed to the Pioneer Memorial Park Association. 

The Eugene Pioneer Cemetery Association said the Pioneer Memorial Park Association was acting as an agent for the UO to acquire the land.

The Eugene Pioneer Cemetery Association tried to force the owners for years to clean up debris and undergrowth around the graves. 

The UO finally dropped its proposal — one idea was to build elevated classrooms over the cemetery — in 1970 after Robert Clark became the university’s president a year earlier, according to a Feb. 12, 1970, story in The Oregonian.

Harrison R. Kincaid Jr. — whose grandfather, former Oregon Secretary of State (1895-99) and longtime publisher of the Oregon State Journal, one of Eugene’s 19^th century newspapers, is buried in the cemetery — filed a $200,000 lawsuit in U.S. District Court in Portland, alleging the UO was part of a years-long conspiracy to obtain the land.

But it was only after Ruth Lake Holmes, the Eugene Pioneer Cemetery Association board president for a half century, discovered that Renninger was a Medal of Honor recipient that any threat from the UO to acquire the cemetery land died for good, Brandner said.

Someone was cleaning Renninger’s gravesite of undergrowth and noticed the depiction and words on the side of his tombstone, Brandner said.

“And, by golly, it said he was a Medal of Honor winner,” she said.

The cemetery was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in the 1980s. The “centerpiece of that paperwork” was Renninger’s Medal of Honor status, according to a document that Quentin Holmes, son of Ruth Lake Holmes and the Eugene Pioneer Cemetery Association’s current president, sent me. 

“Congress has a law that the final resting spot of a Congressional Medal of Honor winner is sacred and cannot be disturbed,” the document says. 

While that appears unclear, it seems safe to say that relocating the grave of a Medal of Honor recipient would be difficult without a court order and that certain laws and programs provide strict guidelines for their final resting places. 

If it wasn’t for that guy, this place would be a parking lot,” said George Dull, who’s lived in a trailer at the cemetery for 33 years and is its groundskeeper.

The Medal of Honor was created at the beginning of the Civil War, first for the Navy in 1861, and then the Army in 1862, as a means to boost morale after humiliating defeats early on and to honor those who distinguish themselves “through conspicuous gallantry and intrepidity at the risk of life above and beyond the call of duty,” according to the U.S. Department of Defense.

There are now three versions of the medal, one each for each military department, Army, Navy and Air Force.

Oregon Medal of Honor recipients

The Oregon Veterans Medal of Honor Memorial at the State Capitol in Salem recognizes 26 Medal of Honor recipients with ties to the state, including 13 who enlisted in Oregon and another 13 who are either buried here or were born here.

Renninger and the other three Civil War Medal of Honor recipients buried in Oregon were all born elsewhere but moved to the state later in life. Besides Renninger, they include: Alaric B. Chapin, Hartwell B. Compson and Nathan H. Edgerton.

Of the 13 Medal of Honor recipients who entered the service in Oregon, only one entered in Lane County. 

Maximo Yabes, born in Lodi, California, in 1932, moved to Oakridge as a child and left Oakridge High School to join the Army in 1950 at an office in Eugene, according to his Wikipedia page. 

Yabes spent 17 years in the Army before his death fighting in Vietnam in 1967. He used his body as a shield to protect others in a bunker during a Viet Cong attack and destroyed an enemy machine gun position, killing its entire crew before being mortally wounded.

He’s buried at Fort Logan National Cemetery in Denver. The memorial in Greenwaters Park in Oakridge includes a bust of Yabes. 

In 2017, the Bend Heroes Foundation was successful in getting U.S. Highway 20 designated the Oregon Medal of Honor Highway, honoring all 26 medal recipients connected to the state across 451 miles of road from Newport on the coast to Nyssa at the Idaho border.

Late last year, that project turned into a national one, as bipartisan legislation turned the nation’s longest road, Highway 20 from Newport to Boston, across 12 states, into the “National Medal of Honor Highway.” The highway now represents all 3,547 Medal of Honor recipients, including Renninger, of course.

‘Life deals us many things’

Which brings us back to Mike Miner. How could a kid who grew up in Eugene, who estimates he walked through Eugene Pioneer Cemetery at least 20 times as a young man, back when he still could walk, never have known his great-great-grandfather was buried there or the dramatic story of how he was such a distinguished soldier.

“My dad never spoke of this man,” Miner said. “I never met him.”

Miner wasn’t talking about Louis Renninger, who died 46 years before Miner was born. He was talking about the paternal grandfather he never knew, John Miner, the father of Mike Miner’s father, John Dale Miner.

John Miner was married to the woman aforementioned as Mary Elizabeth Renninger Moe, Louis Renninger’s granddaughter, born in Marcola in 1905, three years before Cpl. Renninger’s death. 

But in the 1940s, she would have been Mary Elizabeth Renninger Miner, until she filed for divorce from John Miner.

Two lines in the July 10, 1946, Eugene Register-Guard tell that story: “Divorce suits: Mary Miner vs. John Miner, cruel and inhumane treatment.”

This might explain why John Dale Miner never wanted to tell his sons, Mike and his younger brother, Kirby, and their older sister, Tamara, who died of kidney failure related to diabetes in 2011 at age 59, anything about their grandfather.

“The standing joke in the family was, ‘I wonder how many times Mary was married?’ Mike Miner said of his grandmother, who he knew as a resident of the Cottage Grove area and an outstanding cook at the Village Green, the hotel and restaurant that for decades was a local landmark in south Lane County before closing its doors in 2021.

“She was a very good cook,” Mike Miner said. “She used to brag about a $100 tip a guy gave her. ‘Best damn meal I ever had in my life.’”

While it would seem Miner’s Grandma Mary must have certainly known about her grandfather and his burial in Eugene Pioneer Cemetery, perhaps the part about the Medal of Honor just got lost over the years?

“I really don’t,” Miner said, when asked if he thinks his father knew about Louis Renninger. 

John Dale Miner was estranged from his mother, Mary, Mike Miner said, a split that dated back to the Korean War, when John would send money home to his mother, thinking she was saving it for him when he left the Navy. But when he did return, the money was gone, Miner said.

Over the years, they might be in the same room together, but they wouldn’t speak, he recalled. 

Miner once visited his grandmother in the early ‘70s after she moved to Port Angeles, he said, but that was probably the last time he saw her. 

“Mary was a very tough woman,” Miner said.

He remembers the story of her slipping on ice in a store parking lot in Port Angeles. 

“She picked herself up, got in the car and drove home.” Then she drove to the doctor and walked in the door.

“How did you get here?” the doctor asked. 

“I walked in here,” she said. With a broken hip.

“That’s the kind of woman she was,” Miner said, a woman “who used to set chokers for loggers back in the day.”

Miner does remember his father taking him and Kirby to Coburg when they were kids in the ‘60s, and probably into Mike’s high school years at Churchill.

They would go once a year to the IOOF Cemetery in Coburg to clean up the graves of some folks with the last name Renninger. Those would be John and Irene Renninger’s graves, Mary’s parents, and the grave of her older brother, Omar, who drowned in the McKenzie River at age 16 in 1918.

But he didn’t think much of the connection, Miner recalled. It was more of a chore he just wanted to get done. 

Perhaps Grandma Mary’s toughness came from a gene she inherited from her grandfather, who exhibited it that day in Vicksburg 162 years ago. 

And perhaps it, once again, skipped a generation and the reason why Mike Miner is still here, four years older than his great-great-grandfather was when he died.

“You know, it doesn’t affect me. I’m pretty resilient,” Miner said of what life has been like in a wheelchair since that fateful day in Reno 35 years ago, when he was clinically dead twice after falling off a beached speedboat and drowning, only to be revived and then flatlined in the hospital before being resuscitated once again.

“Life deals us many things,” said Miner, who has shared the news of Renninger’s grave with his brother, Kirby, and the rest of his family, including wife, Ruth, and his other children, Kyle and Kailey, and plans to bring them all to see it.

“They were very surprised,” Miner said, “just like all of us.”