behind AotW

a companion to Antietam on the Web

  • View on the Guadalupe, Seguin, Texas

    Andrew N. Erskine operated a stage post and inn at Seguin as well as a gristmill, sawmill and ferry on the Guadalupe River, in a part of Guadalupe County, TX still known today as Erskine Ferry. He was also County Clerk and a militia Lieutenant when the war began, and he and brother Alexander almost immediately enlisted in Company D, 4th Texas Infantry. He was killed instantly by a gunshot through his temple at Sharpsburg on 17 September 1862.

    This watercolor of the ferry on the road to San Antonio was painted by Sarah Ann Lillie Hardinge in 1853, the year after Erskine took it over from his father-in-law. It’s in the Amon Carter Museum of American Art in Fort Worth, TX.

  • Randle memorial, Oak Hill (1904)

    This is a life-size memorial statue of Edmund Troup Randle at his gravesite in Union Springs, Alabama. Know as Troup, he was First Lieutenant of Company D of the 3rd Alabama Infantry when he was wounded at Turner’s Gap on South Mountain in September 1862. He was their Captain when his right arm was mangled in action at Chancellorsville in May 1863.

  • Lt T J Carver

    This is Thomas Jefferson Carver, Jr who enlisted in April 1861, age 18, as a Private in the 3rd Alabama Infantry. Known as Jeff, he was among the very first Confederate troops to cross the Potomac into Maryland at the start of the Campaign on 4 September 1862. He was seriously wounded at Turner’s Gap on the 14th and later had commissioned service. This photograph of him in a Lieutenant’s uniform was contributed to Findagrave by Charles B Moore (?).

  • 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 a “bombshell. Soon afterward his leg was amputated and he was sent home to Marion County, Alabama on furlough. In April 1863 he was detailed from his Company to Columbus, Mississippi to use his skills as a shoemaker for the Confederacy. He was there for at least a year, but I have no further military information for him after April 1864.

    After the war he was a shoemaker and farmer, and probably a preacher; in his native county to about 1880, then in Texas. He lived to be 84 years old.

    Although his life story is not especially noteworthy for a Civil War soldier, the way it became tangled with another McKay’s after his death is very interesting. And, for a researcher like myself, also very confusing. I’m not certain I’ve sorted it out, even now. See what you make of it …

    The issues first jumped out at me through a couple of cemetery markers.

    (more…)

  • Alabama Confederate soldier Census, 1907

    On this 1907 questionnaire, Henry W Miller, late Private in the 26th Alabama Infantry, related a small story of how he was cared for by a Federal soldier after he had been wounded at Turner’s Gap on 14 September 1862. He was then just 16 years old. He was sent home, disabled, after he was exchanged in May 1863.

    This document is from the Alabama Department of Archives and History in Montgomery and was posted online by Family Search (free membership required).