Departures of note

Albert Cashier, born Jennie Irene Hodgers in Clogherhead, Ireland, on December 25, 1843, enlisted in the Union Army on August 6, 1862, under the name Albert D.J. Cashier. Assigned to Company G of the 95th Illinois Infantry, he stood 5'3” and weighed 110 pounds. The medical examination consisted only of showing hands and feet, and Cashier passed easily. He could not read or write, marking an X on his enlistment papers. Fellow soldiers recalled him as reserved and preferring not to share a tent.

Cashier's regiment became part of the Army of the Tennessee under General Ulysses S. Grant and fought in approximately forty battles, including the Siege of Vicksburg. During that campaign, he was captured while performing reconnaissance but escaped and returned to his regiment. In June 1863, he contracted chronic diarrhea and entered a military hospital, where his birth sex remained undiscovered. The regiment also saw action at the Red River Campaign and the Battle of Brice's Crossroads in June 1864, suffering heavy casualties. Cashier was honorably discharged on August 17, 1865.

After the war, Cashier returned to Illinois, settling in Saunemin in 1869, where he worked as a farmhand, church janitor, cemetery worker, and street lamplighter. Living as a man allowed him to vote and later claim a veteran's pension, which began in 1907. In 1911, while working for State Senator Ira Lish, he was hit by the senator's car and broke his leg. A physician discovered his birth sex in the hospital but did not disclose it. No longer able to work, Cashier moved to the Soldiers and Sailors Home in Quincy, Illinois, in May 1911, and later to the Watertown State Hospital for the Insane in March 1914, where attendants discovered his birth sex and made him wear women's clothes again after more than fifty years of dressing as male.

Cashier died on October 10, 1915, and was buried in uniform with full military honors. The government supplied a gravestone inscribed with his military name. It took the executor of his estate nine years to trace his identity back to Jennie Hodgers. In 1977, local residents erected a larger headstone inscribed with both names. His one-room house, relocated eight times over 137 years, was rescued from being burned down by firefighters and restored, dedicated in a ceremony in August 2011. Historians have suggested Cashier was a trans man due to his consistent male identity for at least 53 years.