behind AotW

Sergeant Ben Mell, of Cobb’s Legion was mortally wounded at Crampton’s Gap on 14 September 1862, left on the field, and captured. After about a week at a field hospital he was taken in by local citizen and “southern sympathizer” Thomas Sim Lee, a distant relative of Robert E. Lee. He was treated by local doctors and nursed by the Lee family, but he died of his wounds on 20 October.

Benn was son of Patrick Hues Mell, the Vice Chancellor of the University of Georgia, and he graduated from the University of Georgia in 1861 at the top of his class. His photograph is from Annie and Patrick Mell, Jr’s The Genealogy of the Mell Family in the Southern States (1897).