Magnus W. Stribling was born on December 7, 1822, in Augusta County, Virginia, to Erasmus Stribling and Matilda Kinney. His father was a lawyer who served as mayor of Staunton and clerk of the Augusta County court. His mother died in April 1829, when Magnus was only six years old.

Magnus’s older brother, Francis Taliaferro Stribling, enrolled at the University of Virginia in 1829 and earned his medical degree from the University of Pennsylvania in 1831. Magnus followed this same path twelve years later. In 1841, he enrolled at UVA to study medicine, chemistry, and anatomy. He transferred to the University of Pennsylvania after only a year, and he received his medical degree in 1843. Stribling married Anna M. Crouse on September 5, 1844, in Pickaway, Ohio, and they had eight children together: Fannie Matilda, born December 7, 1846; Flora Kinney, born around 1848; Charles Arthur, born July 19, 1850; Evans Crouse, born around 1850; John Lewis, born July 12, 1852; Erasmus Grant, born around 1852; William Magnus, born around 1859; and Robert Evans born around 1862. They lived with Anna’s father Charles Crouse in Circleville, Ohio, where Stribling worked as a druggist.

On March 8, 1862, Stribling enlisted as a private in Company C of the 61st Ohio Infantry in Circleville. Seven months later, on October 9, the army promoted him to second lieutenant and assigned him to the ambulance corps. He took part in the Atlanta campaign, and Confederate forces captured him in Dallas, Georgia, during the summer of 1864. Confederates sent him to “Camp Asylum,” a new prison camp in Columbia, South Carolina, on the grounds of the State Lunatic Asylum. Family tradition says that he also spent time in Andersonville Prison, where he provided medical care for the imprisoned Union soldiers. The Confederate army exchanged him in March 1865, and he returned home to Circleville “to the great joy of their families.” He was transferred to Company E of the 82nd Ohio Infantry on March 31 and was discharged in Louisville, Kentucky, on July 3.

After the war, Stribling returned to Circleville and resumed his work as a physician. He retired sometime in the 1870s. Around 1881, he suffered a horse-riding accident that permanently disabled his arm and hand. His health deteriorated later in life, and on September 27, 1890, he began receiving a $12-per-month pension for piles, rectal disease, catarrh of the head, and “general prostrations.” He became an alcoholic, and by the late 1890s he lost the ability to care for himself. His daughter Fannie Moore became his legal guardian on May 22, 1899. Three weeks later, on June 10, he was admitted to the Central Branch National Home for Disabled Volunteer Soldiers in Dayton. He died at the soldier’s home of unknown causes on April 24, 1902, and was buried at Forest Cemetery in Circleville.

Document:

Magnus W. Stribling Admitted to Soldiers' Home, June 10, 1899