Gen. James A. Garfield (then chief of staff of the Army of the Cumberland, and future 20th President of the United States, March 1881, and shot in July, dying two months later in 1881) that he be allowed to raise a force to make a raid deeply into the South.

His proposal was to disrupt the Western & Atlantic Railroad from Chattanooga in the northeast to Atlanta further southwest, a crucial southeastern Confederacy rail transport hub and manufacturing town, which carried supplies to the Confederate Army of Tennessee further northwest.

The original intent was to have this force mounted suitably for fast travel and attacks, living off the land for supplies and rations; however, due largely to wartime shortages, Streight's brigade were equipped with mules instead of swifter horses.

Thirteen months after his escape, Streight resigned from the Federal army on March 16, 1865, three weeks before Confederate General Robert E. Lee's surrender at Appomattox Courthouse in April 1865.

[5] The year after the war, after returning home to "The Hoosier State", in 1866, Streight and his wife built a large landmark Greek Revival / Classical Revival style architecture with tall white columns and portico (reminiscent of old-style Southern antebellum plantation manor houses) of a two-story brick mansion on a wooded 23-acre estate in the then rural / country at 4121 East Washington Street.

The old luxurious estate facing on the historic east-west National Road (from Baltimore, Maryland to Vandalia, Illinois near the Mississippi River, (later in the 1920s designated as U.S. Route 40), just east of Indianapolis.

[7] Although initially buried on the front lawn of his residence at his widow's request, his grave was eventually moved ten years later in 1902 to the nearby prominent Crown Hill Cemetery.

The impressive grave site includes a bronze head bust of the merchant, publisher, colonel, prisoner-of-war, and later general, followed by state senator, The sculpture is inserted into and surrounded / surmounted by a huge monumental granite temple-like structure with places beneath for Streight, his wife Lovina and their oldest son John.

"[8] Lovina Streight was known as the "Mother of the 51st", and upon her death 45 years after the war in 1910, her funeral too like his in 1892 was afforded full military honors and attended by a large concourse of veterans and Indiana citizens.

[9] In her probated will, she directed that the large elaborate Streight family mansion on Washington Street should become a home for aged women; however, other relatives successfully challenged the will in orphans court on the grounds that she was of “unsound mind.” Their main arguments used by the plaintiffs were that she believed in spiritualism and was under the influence of B. Frank Schmid, a spiritualist.

The controversial trial, held in nearby Shelbyville, Indiana, over Lavina's will was a big news story in its day, and was covered in the several local daily newspapers of the time.