Cornelius Wheeler was born in 1840 at Medina, New York. As a boy he came with his family to southwestern Wisconsin, where his father worked at various enterprises in Mineral Point and Dodgeville. During 1857 and 1858 Cornelius attended schools in Platteville, Wisconsin and Meriden, New Hampshire. He returned to Wisconsin and in May 1861 enlisted in Company I of the Second Wisconsin Infantry. During the Civil War he participated in the battles of First Bull Run, Second Bull Run, South Mountain, Antietam, Gettysburg, and the Wilderness; in fact, he fought in all of the engagements in which his unit saw action as part of the famed Iron Brigade until June 1864. During his three years of military service, he rose through the ranks and was made first lieutenant of his company when he was mustered out in June 1864. Two months later, in September 1864, Wheeler returned to the South as a civilian clerk employed by the U.S. Army Quartermaster's Department at Little Rock, Arkansas. Here he remained for nearly two years. In addition to his work for the Army, he attempted to operate a cotton plantation with a small group of other Northern associates--a money-making scheme which failed and left him just as “broke” in 1866 as he had been when he first came to Little Rock. In 1867, after his return to Wisconsin, he married and was given a position in his father-in-law's banking business in Portage. In 1892 he was appointed governor of the Northwestern Branch of the National Soldiers' Home, an institution for disabled volunteer soldiers and sailors located at Milwaukee. This position he relinquished less than two weeks before his death on January 13, 1915.
