Junkermann, Julius, 1841-1883

Julius Junkermann was a Republican public figure and private secretary to a governor in Reconstruction Mississippi.

Born on November 14, 1841, in Dusseldorf, Germany, Junkermann moved to the United States in 1860, settling in New Orleans, Louisiana. When the Civil War broke out the following year, he was forced into Confederate service. He reportedly deserted the Confederate army at the Battle of Corinth, Mississippi, and fled to Union lines, where he volunteered for service. He enlisted in the Forty-third Illinois Infantry Regiment and served in the Union army for the rest of the war.

Junkermann resided in Mississippi after the war and was active in Republican Party politics. He married Clara Eggleston, the daughter of Brevet (honorary) Brigadier General Beroth B. Eggleston, a Union officer originally who helped establish the Republican Party in Mississippi during Reconstruction and unsuccessfully ran for governor of the state in the late 1860s. Junkermann and his wife had one daughter.

Junkermann served as Superintendent of Public Education in Washington County, Mississippi, in the early 1870s before becoming Governor Ridgley Powers’s private secretary in 1872. He was commissioned as Quartermaster General, at the rank of brigadier general, in the Mississippi State Militia in January 1872 and served a wide variety of public offices over the next several years, including circuit court clerk in Washington County and U.S. deputy tax collector in Jackson, Mississippi. Junkermann was also nominated for Mississippi state legislature in 1875, but does not appear to have won.

Junkermann, his wife, and much of his wife’s family, moved to Kansas around 1879, after Reconstruction had ended in the south. He edited a German-language newspaper in Kansas and served as justice of the peace for several years. In the early 1880s, Junkermann experienced unspecified health problems. He traveled to Colorado for treatment in 1883, but his condition worsened and he returned home only a few days later and died on June 1, 1883, in Wichita, Kansas. He is buried in Highland Cemetery in Wichita, Kansas.

(FindaGrave; New Orleans Republican, New Orleans, LA, December 8, 1870; The Clarion-Ledger, Jackson, MS, January 11, 1872; Daily Mississippi Pilot, Jackson, MS, October 7, 1875; (Register of Officers and Agents, Divil, Military, and Naval, in the Service of the United States on the Thirtieth of September 1877,, 77; Journal of the Senate of the State of Mississippi, 1873, 548; Beroth B. Eggleston, Sedgwick County KSGenWeb; The Wichita Weekly Beacon, Wichita, KS, June 6, 1883)

Julius Junkermann belonged to the following social groups: