Adelaide Thompson Spurgeon
Adelaide Elizabeth Thompson Spurgeon was a nurse during the American Civil War, and a philanthropist in Washington, D.C.
Early life
Adelaide Elizabeth Thompson was born in England about 1826. She lived in New York before moving to Washington, D.C. in 1861.Career
In May 1861, began volunteering as a nurse and cook at a smallpox hospital in Washington, D.C. She collected donations for the hospital from New York friends. When she became ill herself, she had to resign from the hospital, but she continued as a "secret service" agent at the provost general's headquarters. She told of interviewing two young women who enlisted in disguise, "They both wept bitterly, not only at the disgrace, but at being obliged to return to their homes, leaving their loved ones, perhaps never to see them again." She later petitioned Congress for compensation for her wartime service, and was granted a pension in 1890, when the Senate committee found her to be "very clearly... a meritorious case".Later in life, Spurgeon took an interest in the lives in children in Washington, D.C., and the work of the city's Church of the Epiphany. She sponsored about 150 baptisms at the church in the 1880s. In the 1880s and 1890s, she served as a missionary at the city's Freedmen's Hospital, helping patients find homes after discharge.