When Carl Sandburg enlisted in Company C, Sixth Infantry, Illinois Militia, in the spring of 1898, at the outbreak of the Spanish-American War, he became acquainted with the leader of the company. Thomas L. McGirr had been elected Captain in 1893. He was also an attorney with an office at 134 East Main Street. His residence was in the same building, according to the Galesburg City Directory.

McGirr was born January 12, 1854, the eldest of six children of Mahlon and Sarah L. Barbero McGirr. Mahlon McGirr had migrated from Ohio to Knox County in 1840. He had learned the blacksmith and carpenter trades as a young man. After settling in the Maquon area, he became a successful farmer with extensive holdings.

As a young man, Thomas taught school for a time. He also attended Meadville Theological School in Meadville, Pennsylvania, a Unitarian institution founded in 1844. (The charter of the Ryder Divinity School of Lombard College, a Universalist institution, was combined with Meadville when Lombard College closed in 1930. Since 2011 the seminary has been located in the Spertus Institute building in downtown Chicago.) McGirr then studied law, became an attorney and established his practice in Galesburg.

In his autobiography, Always the Young Strangers, Sandburg described McGirr as a tall, heavy man with a distinct paunch and a large graying mustache. He also wrote that McGirr was not the most successful attorney in the city.

McGirr had a St. Bernard dog named Smuggler, whom he took along on the assignment to Puerto Rico. Some of the Company C men resented that the St. Bernard was fed better food than they were. One of the men in the company said he was determined to shoot McGirr before any of the enemy soldiers did.

After serving in the Spanish-American War, McGirr returned to Galesburg. He was accompanied by Smuggler, as well as by a Puerto Rican boy. What became of the lad has not been determined. He then enlisted in the 40^th United States Infantry and was posted to the Philippines. He served in the Judge Advocate's office on the island of Mindanao for a number of years. After leaving the army McGirr practiced law in Manila for a time. While there he suffered a severe illness which robbed him of his memory.

In 1922, at the age of sixty-eight, McGirr returned to the United States. He may have lived in Galesburg for a time. Dr. R.I. Law, a Civil War veteran and optician, became McGirr's friend and looked after him. McGirr liked to visit the armory and to watch the military practices there.

Eventually, it was necessary to admit Captain McGirr to Watertown State Hospital in East Moline. He died there June 1, 1926. Funeral services were held at the Kimber and West Funeral Home. The Ralph M. Noble American Legion Post furnished the pallbearers, a firing squad and a bugler for the full military services, at the grave.

The Galesburg Evening Mail reported burial would be in Hope Cemetery. The application for a military headstone to mark Thomas L. McGirr's grave states the burial was to be in the Maquon Cemetery. The published readings of the cemeteries by the Knox County Genealogical Society do not show McGirr in either cemetery.