Reenactor portrays Cordelia Harvey

Jessica Michna will portray Cordelia Harvey on Thursday, March 23, at the Waupaca Historical Society. Submitted Photo

Step back in time to the Civil War when reenactor Jessica Michna portrays Cordelia Harvey at 6 p.m., Thursday, March 23, at the Holly History and Genealogy Center.

The program is free and presented by the Waupaca Historical Society.

It will be in the center’s lower-level meeting room. Refreshments will be provided.

Michna will present the story of Harvey, wife of the promising young governor Louis Harvey.

When her husband accidentally drowned on a visit to wounded Wisconsin soldiers in Tennessee in 1862, she found herself facing an unknown future.

But she shared her husband’s dedication to wounded soldiers and was soon after named the official “state sanitary agent.”

She eventually met with President Abraham Lincoln to plead for a soldiers’ hospital in Wisconsin, believing moving wounded soldiers out of the southern climate would aid in recovery.

Following the war, Harvey also founded an orphanage for the children of fallen soldiers.

For Michna, who portrayed Eleanor Roosevelt and Helen Keller in past years in Waupaca, this will make her first visit to the Waupaca Historical Society.