Christopher Van Loon (b. ca. 1818) was a farmer from Schuyler County, New York. He enlisted as a private in Co. H, 107th New York Infantry on August 4, 1862 when he was 44. Van Loon’s letter is typical in the lack of punctuation, non-standard spellings, and eccentric capitalization. As with many other letter writers, he commonly confuses the spellings of homophones (close/clothes, threw/through, tail/tale, our/hour, wood/would). However, Van Loon is fairly articulate and there is little in his letter that would suggest a particular region of the country.