Lt. Ellison, Antietam National Cemetery
25 February 2025
or, yes, there is at least one Confederate in the cemetery
On my recent visit to Sharpsburg I took photographs of several headstones in the Antietam National Cemetery, as is my habit, intending to look into the men under them when I got home. The very first was this one:
The 1869 cemetery History and the current Park Service grave database both list him as Lt. __ Ellison (first name unknown) of the 18th Massachusetts Infantry, and note he was originally buried on the battlefield and later removed to the cemetery.
There were no Ellisons in the 18th Massachusetts. Nor where any other Federal officers named Ellison killed or mortally wounded at Antietam. Or enlisted men, for that matter.
But I did find a good match: he’s Lieutenant William Ellison of the 18th Mississippi Infantry. So, Miss not Mass.
Lt. Ellison was about 21 years old when he was mortally wounded in or near the West Woods at Sharpsburg on 17 September 1862, and he died within a very few days in a field hospital on the Lavenia Grove Farm just west of those woods.
His original burial spot is identified on the 1864 Elliot burial map of the battlefield – as Lt. Wilson (probably a mis-read of W. Ellison) of the 18th Mississippi – just where you’d expect him to be.
I hope I’m not the first person since 1867 to figure out who is under that stone. I’ve not seen mention of it anywhere, though.
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February 26th, 2025 at 9:08 am
Very interesting! I wonder if he has any surviving descendants (even collateral) who would like to know his final resting place.
February 26th, 2025 at 10:52 am
Hi Kathy, I wondered exactly the same!
A first pass through his family tree shows no close Ellison (male) descendants reaching to the present day. He had 2 brothers. One, Thomas, died during the war. The second, Moses (1852-1913), married and had a son and a daughter. Moses’ son William T (1876-1910) apparently died unmarried and childless.
Our William did have 6 sisters – I haven’t followed them.
Going back a generation: his father Thomas P. (1809-1894) had 4 brothers, our William’s uncles, and 2 of them had male children. There were Ellisons in Moses’ (1802-1852) and Lewis’ (1820-1865) lines in Yazoo City, Jackson, and elsewhere in Mississippi at least into the 1970s, so probably still there today.
I hope I’ll hear from family on this.