JAMES B. DEVINE is a son of Joseph and Caroline (Thomson) Devine, and was born in 1844, in Walworth Co., Wis.; yielding to a sudden impulse, he walked up the railroad track to Madison, a distance of fourteen miles, on the 1st of April, 1864, and enlisted in the 37th W. V. I.; was dangerously sick with both yellow fever and typhoid fever during the first part of his service, and was only saved by the care and good sense of a nurse; recovering, he participated in the final struggles made by a dying Confederacy at Richmond and Petersburg; after the two-days flight of April 1 and 2, 1865, part of the rebel works having been captured and the rest silenced, Mr. Devine, believing them abandoned, offered to cross the lines if his Lieutenant would stop the firing of his company; it was stopped, when Mr. Devine and Thomas Applebee crossed, entered the rebel works, and the Union occupation was the result; he was mustered out in July, 1865, returned and is now in charge of his father’s homestead. He married Emily P. Glidden, born in Oneida Co., N.Y.; their eldest is an ethereal-looking boy of 9 summers, who weights 166 pounds, and has weighed 172—“a good chunk of a boy,” there are three children—Joseph A., Burnet M. and Erma E.—but only the eldest is unusually large.
1880 Dane County History, Town of Oregon, p. 1237