behind AotW

One of the founding partners of Pittsburgh’s Equitable Meter Company (sometime after 1883) was Civil War veteran Henry Holdship King, who was a cavalry Lieutenant and staff officer in 1862. He came to my attention as the man the mortally wounded Colonel James H Childs, 4th Pennsylvania Cavalry called to his side at Antietam on 17 September 1862.

This is Lieutenant King in August 1862, newly appointed acting Assistant Adjutant General on Colonel W.W. Averell’s brigade staff.

Henry King had a long and successful life, with careers as an oil man, lawyer, and manufacturer, in Denver, CO, Philadelphia, and Pittsburgh, PA, where he grew up, the son of a similarly-minded entrepreneur.

Here’s his obituary from the New York Times of 4 October 1932 (touch to enlarge).

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The meter face pictured above was offered for sale on Etsy by MetalurgieVintage.

His August 1862 picture is from an Alexander Gardner group photograph of Averell and 3 of his officers, at the Library of Congress.

It’s generally known that at least hundreds, perhaps thousands of Confederate soldiers did not cross into Maryland with the rest of the Army of Northern Virginia in September 1862 due to being barefoot. Until now, I’ve not seen documentation of this for a named individual soldier.

Meet Henry M. Adams, Private, Company C, 2nd Mississippi Battalion.

Henry spent most of September, while his unit and the rest of the army were in Maryland, at the depot established for men and equipment at Winchester, VA.

He had enlisted in his hometown of Columbus, MS on 19 July 1861 with Captain Auguston Mizell, later the regiment’s Quartermaster, in what became Company C of the 2nd Infantry Battalion. By January 1863 the Battalion had grown to become the 48th Mississippi Infantry Regiment. He was wounded in May 1863 in action with them at Chancellorsville, VA and was in hospitals and on furlough home to about October 1863. He was in and out of Richmond, VA hospitals from 6 May 1864 with a gunshot-broken jaw, and never returned to his Company. He was retired to Company D, First Battalion, Invalid Corps, PACS in Meridian, MS in February 1865 with no later military record.

The document above, like the rest of the military information about Private Adams, comes from his Compiled Military Service Record file at the National Archives, online from fold3.

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Update: As I scrubbed through the CMSRs for the men of the 2nd Mississippi Infantry Battalion, I found other men of that unit documented as left behind for lack of shoes …

– Pvt George C Boyle, Co. C; afterward listed as AWOL to December 1862 with no later military record.

– Pvt William S. Mount, Co. H; “left at Leesburg bare footed.” Largely absent, sick or wounded through 1863; captured or surrendered in Vicksburg, MS in October 1863 (while on furlough?). Released from Alton Prison, IL on 6 April 1864 after taking oath of allegiance.

In a comment on an earlier post about the cavalry action at Quebec Schoolhouse near Middletown, MD on 13 September 1862, Amy Matzet offered a fascinating story about one of the participants – Thomas Groves Day – a Private in Company E of the 3rd Indiana Cavalry.

The short version is that Private Day lost his carbine during the fight, picked up a Confederate weapon to replace it, but soon after lost that to a Confederate Surgeon under a flag of truce. Amazingly, a young Middletown resident and battle witness had kept that same Confederate carbine since 1862 and happened to meet Day when he visited the area in 1899. Thomas Day took that weapon home to Indiana.

Ms Matzet has the details thanks to a scrapbook of family papers, clippings, and photographs handed down by her grandmother Hester Lucille Day Warfield. Hester was Thomas Day’s granddaughter. Thanks to them, I can show you two excellent artifacts of that story.

His photograph, in 1899, on a visit to Quebec Schoolhouse:

A transcription of an article in the Middletown Valley Register (1899) telling his battle story and events of that visit: