Category: biography
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Piecing a soldier’s story together
With a nudge from a record in the Frederick Patient List database, I went looking for 2nd Lieutenant J. Corfro of Company I, 1st North Carolina Infantry, only to find he probably never existed, despite his shiny new government-issue marker at Mt. Olivet Cemetery in Frederick, MD. That Lieutenant lived only on paper, in Federal…
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Julius Rabardy loses his leg, lives a life
In his diary after the battle of Antietam Private Julius Rabardy wrote: The air is full of explosions and the smell of brimstone, missiles of all kinds strike the trees and dead branches fall among the wounded. I was shot through the right thigh. A poor fellow with uplifted arm begs for water. The arm…
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H.T. McKay, 26th Alabama
Harley Tuttle McKay was a 27 year old shoemaker in 1861 when he left his wife and two year old son and enlisted in the Sons of ’76 – Company H of the 26th Alabama Infantry regiment. On 14 September 1862 near Turner’s Gap on South Mountain he was seriously wounded in the leg by…
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The view of a staff officer in Maryland
Lieutenant Richard C. Shannon of the 5th Maine Infantry was assigned as aide-de-camp to Major General Henry W. Slocum, commander of the First Division, 6th Army Corps, in March 1862. Although a well-educated young man, he was still learning his profession as a staff officer in August and September 1862. Shannon left behind some wartime…
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Quebec Schoolhouse: a desperate little cavalry battle
I got pulled off track by a trooper of the 3rd Indiana Cavalry, James Williamson, who was killed in a little-known cavalry skirmish at the Quebec Schoolhouse near Middletown, MD on 13 September 1862 …
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This stuff will drive you nuts
The Antietam Cemetery History has him as Daniel Mibbon, 18th New York Infantry (thanks Western Maryland’s Historical Library/WHILBR!). It’s Dan’l Mibbon, N.Y. on his stone. Frederick hospital records list him as Daniel S. Milborne, 13th New York (thanks National Museum of Civil War Medicine!). He doesn’t appear in the rosters for either of those regiments…
