Sirene Bunten
Biographical Information
Among West Virginia’s least known authors is perhaps one of its most important. Sirene Bunten never made the New York Times bestseller list or sold thousands of books. She wrote only a diary, a diary handed down through her family for generations before being donated to the Annie Merner Pfeiffer Library at West Virginia Wesleyan College where it was later edited and published under the title We Shall Know What War Is. Her words, of family and loyalty and hardship and triumph, of war and remembrance create a real and vivid picture of the Civil War years in West Virginia, years when families were separated by distance and war and divided by loyalties and honor.Most of what we know about this intriguing young woman comes from her own words, with other details supplied by census records and family history. Sirene Bunten was born in French Creek, West Virginia, in April 1847. The small community, about a dozen miles south of Buckhannon, was home mainly to farming families. The Bunten family was typical in size for its time and place; Sirene had three brothers and three sisters. Like many Civil War-era West Virginia families, the Buntens faced the divisions of north and south very personally—one Bunten sister, Elsey, was nearly estranged from her family when she married Fenton Payne, a Confederate sympathizer. Sirene’s brothers served in the Union Army—two with Company E of the 3rd Virginia Volunteers, the other with Company I of the 40th Illinois. Sirene Bunten most likely would have lived and died and slipped quietly into the obscurity of history but for the fact she kept a diary. And her diary, guarded and passed down for over a half a century by her descendants, has become a priceless history of life in rural West Virginia during the Civil War years in West Virginia as well as a personal and riveting look at the lives of rural mountain women in late nineteenth century.
Sirene’s diary begins on New Year’s Day 1863, when the young girl was fifteen years old and continues through the entire war before ending in the late 1860s. Sirene paints a portrait of her family—her mother, a seamstress, is mentioned only briefly and her father had died before the Civil War. She talks much of her siblings—the brothers serving in the war and the sisters left at home to manage and to worry. Sirene, while young, was a keen observer with firm opinions, commenting on the policies of the Lincoln administration and the Union generals she thought were good, or less than good, at their jobs. She also records the rumors of war atrocities--some true, some not—that circulated through the community. The diary ends in October 1867, when details of religious services attended had replaced the war stories. There is one final entry, dated 1901, which Sirene used to comment on her own earlier writings and to fill in details of her later life, including her marriage to Joseph Reger. Sirene Bunten Reger died at Buckhannon in 1912.
Critical Responses
In his introduction to the published edition of Sirene Bunten’s diary, Stephen Cresswell comments that “despite her relative youth, Sirene Bunten proved herself a thoughtful analyst of the events that surrounded her.” Certainly thousands of diaries from the Civil War era have survived—diaries of soldiers, statesmen, even home-front wives—but Bunten’s diary is unique in that its author was both a teenage girl and a rural West Virginian. Her diary provides a personal and detailed look at the life of a young mountain woman with all its beauty and hardship.
Works Published
- The Diary of Sirene Bunten published as We Shall Know What War Is. edited and Introduction by Stephen Cresswell.
Selected Bibliography
none available
Author Website
None available