Sally Louisa Tompkins was born November 9, 1833 in Poplar Grove in Tidewater region on Virginia’s Middle Peninsula. She was born to father Colonel Christopher Tompkins and mother Maria Patterson Tompkins. She had four sisters three of which died from a local epidemic that also took her father. Their names are Martha Tompkins Harriet Tompkins and Elizabeth Tompkins. Her only surviving family being her sister Maria Tompkins and her mother. Her father was a American Revolutionary War veteran and a very wealthy merchant. After the deaths of Colonel Tompkins and her sisters, Sally and her remaining family members left Poplar Grove and moved to Norfolk, VA. Even though Sally had a rough childhood she loved helping people. She helped others by nursing …show more content…
She was one of two women who were officially commissioned as officers in the confederate states army. The Robertson Hospital had the lowest mortality rate of any other military hospital. Seventy-three deaths out of one thousand three hundred thirty-four patients. Sally refused to take any payment for the work she did. Mary Chesnut an author and a civil war diarist visited the hospital very frenquently. She wrote “Our Florence Nightingale is Sally Tompkins.” Sally Tompkins was a local hero in Richmond, she kept her hospital open two months after them war. Once the hospital was closed, Sally visited her family members around Virginia. She volunteered to be a Sunday school teacher at the St. James Episcopal Church, she was an active member there for a chunk of her life. Sally died in July 26, 1961 of natural causes, she died in the Confederate Woman’s Home in Richmond and she was burried with military honors. I would like to ask this woman how it felt to be under that constant pressure to keep all those hundreds of wounded men