Year: 2021

This is from Sharpsburg veteran James C. Loggins‘ obituary [via GoogleBooks] in the Texas State Journal of Medicine of November 1921. He enlisted very young, and was only 16 years old in Maryland in 1862. He was captured the following year at Gettysburg, but escaped from Fort Delaware in 1864 to return to duty. After…

A very happy New Year to both of my readers! I hope you’ll appreciate this timely symbol of the most significant outcome of the 1862 Battle of Antietam – the issue of the Emancipation Proclamation. Watch Night: a New Year’s tradition still alive in Black churches today. This evocative painting is by William Tolman Carlton…

No, Sergeant Richard H Skinner of the 4th Texas Infantry did not lie on the field at Gettysburg, PA for 17 days without medical attention. Nor did he “remain three months hovering between life and death” afterward. He was badly wounded at Gettysburg on 2 July 1863, captured at Cashtown on the 5th, in a…

Here’s the relatively modern government marker in Prospect Cemetery in Morgan County, GA for Sharpsburg veteran Absalom R. Jones. He was a Private in Company F (wrong on the stone), 4th Texas Infantry until October 1864, then a “galvanized Yankee” in Company C of the 4th United States Volunteers to June 1866, with service in…

Robert Weakley Brahan was born into a prominent Nashville, TN family in 1811, trained as a physician, married well, and had all the right friends, among them, apparently, President Andrew Jackson. After a decade in Panola County, MS, he took his family to Bexar County, TX in 1852 and established a large plantation and raised…

Sharpsburg Veteran and former Texas Ranger Hiram B. Rogers was a farmer near Chalk Mountain, Texas by 1900 and was still farming there at age 80 in 1920. Chalk Mountain is on the somewhat flexible border between Erath and Somervell Counties, so Rogers appears in both counties in various Census records. Chalk Mountain was always…