James H. Harden was born around 1837 in Indiana to George and Bathsheba Harden. His father was a farmer who owned $2,200 of real estate in 1850. The family moved to Hamilton County, Iowa, in the late 1840s. He married Mary A. Walker on December 25, 1857, and they had at least seven children: Alpha, born around 1859; Anna, born around 1862; Fannie, born around 1864; Clara, born around 1867; Edward, born around 1869; Nellie, born around 1876; and Harvey, born around 1877. By 1860, they were living in Pleasant, Iowa, and Harden was working as a farmer. They owned $500 of real estate and $60 of personal property.

 

Harden enlisted in the Union army on August 11, 1862, and he mustered in as a private in Company E of the 34^th Iowa Infantry on October 15. He observed that a “soldiers life is a pretty hard one,” because they have “many hardships to undergo and many privations to encounter that one who has never experienced a soldiers life little dream of.” Nonetheless, he wrote, “there is one consoling thought for the many hardships and that is that there is a better time acomeing when war and fightings will be at an end and the authority of the United States will be established in every village and respect for her laws kno no bounds in this wourld.” He was wounded in the knee on January 11, 1863, in the Battle of Arkansas Post, and he mustered out on April 3, 1863. He returned to Iowa after leaving the army, and he applied for a federal pension later that month.

 

The family moved to Kansas in the late 1860s, and Harden worked as a farmer. By 1880, they were living in Dexter, Kansas. They moved to Bartow, Florida, around 1882, and he served as a postmaster there. By 1910, he was living in his daughter Nellie’s household in Tampa, Florida. He died in 1911.

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