War News: Private Daniel Gallagher

February 21, 2018 The Clarke County Democrat (Grove Hill), February 21, 1918

Readers of the February 21, 1918, edition of the Clarke County Democrat found welcomed news on page five: Daniel B. Gallagher was alive and well. Six months earlier, newspapers throughout Alabama had reported the young private missing and presumed dead, one of Alabama’s first potential casualties in the Great War.

On November 3, 1917, Gallagher was wounded in an early skirmish with German forces in France, just a few days after he and the other members of the Sixteenth Infantry’s Company F arrived at the front. Wounded in three places, he survived and was taken as a prisoner of war. The eighteen-year-old Gallagher was transferred to a camp in Touschell. Months later, through the aid of the Red Cross, Gallagher sent a letter to his parents, Neill and Leone, in Blocton, Alabama, telling them he was alive and almost fully recovered. During the month of February 1918, more than fifty Alabama newspapers reported the good news.

Gallagher returned to the United States in July 1919. He later moved to Konawa, Oklahoma, where he married Nan Robinson. The couple had one daughter, Mary Ellen, born in 1928. Daniel Gallagher died in 1972 and is buried in the Konawa memorial Cemetery.

View Gallager's WWI military service record in the Alabama Dept. of Archives and History's collection here.

The Troy Messenger (Troy), November 7, 1917

 The Centreville Press (Centreville), March 28. 1918