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The

Deyerle

Brothers of

Salem,

Virginia.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Major Charles Peter Deyerle, Surgeon, U.S. Army.

Sixthplate daguerreotype, ca. 1846.

Charles Peter Deyerle was one of the first matriculants to the Virginia Military Institute, entering the school in 1839 and graduating in its first class.  He continued study at Jefferson Medical College in Philadelphia and served in the U.S. Army as a medical officer on the staff of General Worth.  After service in the Mexican War, Surgeon Deyerle was sent with the U.S. Army to Fort Humboldt, California, where he wrote his brother in 1853:

"In Mexico, I contracted the universal disease among the troops, and from which hundreds -- even thousands died, that is diarrhea in a chronic form.  After leaving there I had recovered but the exposures, the privations, and crude diet of the first two years in California brought it back and it continues upon me.  I only have occasionally attacks from changes of climate and water, but I fear the tendency to it is now confirmed.  It has debilitated and worn me down very much at times, and made me feel many years older than when you last saw me...I suffer much at times from a dry cough, sweats, etc. -- easily affected by a slight change of weather...I have felt all these symptoms more strongly since I came here in January, and our exposed condition in tents during the cold rains of winter aggravated them...I feel that I shall not live to be an old man..."  (Ellington, Charles Peter Deyerle at Fort Humboldt)

 Deyerle died in service in California shortly after the above quote was written.  His carved marble gravestone in Salem is worthy of preservation.

      

Captain Madison Pitzer Deyerle, Co. I, 28th Virginia Infantry.

Sixthplate Melainotype.

 

Madison Pitzer Deyerle was a natural choice to organize Salem's Company I, since he had some formal military training from his days as a VMI cadet.   

 

Deyerle and his company came under fire at the first Battle of Manassas.  Some time after that battle, operations moved to Virginia's Peninsula. Captain Deyerle fell at the head of his command early in the campaign at the Battle of Williamsburg, May 5, 1862.

Lieutenant Ballard Poague Deyerle

Quarterplate ambrotype.

Sixthplate ambrotype.

B.P. Deyerle's service was in the Confederate artillery.  These two ambotypes taken at different times during the war show the contrast in his appearance that hard service brought to him.  He survived the war, but was never able to shake the chronic bad health that the war inflicted upon him. 

He died in 1870.

 

 

 

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Captain Fayette Hewitt, Staff, Kentucky Orphan Brigade

Sixthplate Melainotype

The State of Kentucky was a border state and the State's soldiers who went South were referred to as Orphans, as they could not return home during the war.  Hewitt was from Elizabethtown, Kentucky.  His great contribution to Civil War history is that he preserved the records of his Orphan Brigade, allowing the comprehensive history of the Brigade to be written.  Hewitt served as a staff officer for Generals Albert Pike, Benjamin Hardin Helm (who ironically was a brother-in-law to U.S. President Abraham Lincoln) and, after Helm was killed at Chickamauga, Joseph Lewis.  Hewitt was one generation out of Bedford County, Virginia. as his father had moved to Kentucky before he was born.

"His courage was one of that superior kind which enables a man to be perfectly collected and cool and not to be thrown off his guard or unsteadied by the most imminent and trying danger.  Going into the battle of Entrenchment Creek (Atlanta), he saw a soldier throw away his blanket because it was so in the way while fighting.  General Hewitt remonstrated and told the man he would need it if wounded.  Then he tied the blanket behind his own horse.  This horse was shot under him, and General Hewitt unbuckled the blanket and carried it till another horse was procured.  After the battle General Hewitt restored the blanket to its owner, who was in the field hospital, badly wounded.  The man said he had seen the horse shot; and if it had been him he would never have thought of that blanket, but only of getting away."

"Besides this horse, he had two others shot under him, but was never injured himself, though balls repeatedly passed through his clothing and hat and once through his hair."

                                                                                          From Hewitt's Obituary in Confederate Veteran.

 

 

 

 

Images

   

    and

       textiles.

Lieutenant Henry Fitzgerald and family, Richmond, Virginia.

Quarterplate ambrotype attributed to C.R. Rees, Richmond.

 

Henry Fitzgerald was a native of Glasgow, Scotland, and a pattern maker by trade.  His wartime service began as a lieutenant in the Sixth Virginia Infantry. His family portrait dated to that time in his service.  Soon, Fitzgerald's talents in ordnance production resulted in his transfer to the Confederate Carbine Manufactory at Tredegar.

As Captain of a battalion of carbine factory workers, Fitzgerald led his soldiers in the 1864 repulse of the raid on Richmond by Union Colonel Ulrich Dalgren.  Fitzgerald was reportedly briefly captured by the Union raiders.  He was, after the war, City Marshal of Manchester, residing on Hull Street.

Fitzgerald's first wife, pictured in the ambrotype, died in 1868.  Perhaps that explains the survival of her silk dress she wore in the family portrait.

Imagine the look on the faces of my sword collecting buddies when I told them, with a look of conquest, of my purchase of this portrait and dress.

                   "Chronology is the refuge of the simple-minded."

                                                 Historian and author Joseph J. Ellis, alumnus of the College of William and Mary

 

 

 

 
 

 

 

 

 

 

"Those war letters and diaries of the eighteen-sixties, so informative when available, so deplored when lost, exhibit...as marked a difference from present-day thought on religion as perhaps ever has been wrought in seven decades.  Many of the men who appear in these pages kept religion in the same sanctuary of the heart with patriotism and love of home.  Acceptance of traditional Christianity was almost universal.  Mild and reverent deism was viewed with horror.  Doubt was damnation.  Agnosticism was service to the antichrist.  What was believed was professed..."

                                     Douglas Southall Freeman, Lee's Lieutenants, introduction to Volume 1.

Campbell County resident Thomas Cock joined his hometown unit, the Red House Volunteers, at the beginning of the war.  His Confederate service was as a member of Co. A, 21st Virginia Infantry.  Service was hard under Jackson, Lee and Early, and he barely survived the destruction of the Stonewall Brigade at Spotsylvania in 1864.  At some point he was given, perhaps through the efforts of army chaplains or General Jackson himself, this pocket testament which was printed in Atlanta in 1862. 

His luck ran out in July, 1864, at Monocacy Junction, Maryland. 

Unable to write well due to the nature of his wound, Ward Master H.S. Shepherd of West's Hospital, Baltmore, gently assisted Private Cock when he inscribed the following passages in the Testament:

Cover:  "Thomas Cox / Morris Church / Carroll County, Va. / Co. A / 21 Va."  (Morris Church was actually in eastern Campbell County, near its border with Charlotte County).

"The ball that struck this book entered my left brest (sic) and came out of right -- it saved instant death & will be the means of saving my soul.   Thomas Cox.  Blessed are the dead that die in the Lord."

"I was with Thos. Cox when he died...he was willing...& appear ready to leave this world for a better one to come.  H.S. Shepherd, w.m. West's Hospital Baltimore."

Private Cock never left Maryland.  He was buried in Loudoun Cemetery in Baltimore.  His testament and a ring from his finger was carefully sent by Shepherd to Cock's widow in Southside Virginia.

 
 

 

Corporal Samuel Henry Overton, "Appomattox Invincibles" (Later Co. A, 44th Va. Inf.).

Halfplate ambrotype signed by Rees, Richmond, Virginia.

"The regiment was fortunate to possess better arms and uniforms than other Confederate units.  Company A wore a uniform of cloth from Richmond, designed by John M. Steptoe. 'It is to be gray pants with black stripes one inch wide, a gray shirt with collar to turn down or throw open and trimmed with black cord.  The cap also will be gray with a black band.  The pants and shirt to be held to the waist with a patent lether [sic] belt with brass plate in front." Henderson, 44th Virginia Infantry in the H.E.Howard Virginia Regimental History Series.

Overton was 23 at his enlistment on May 10, 1861, a tobacconist from Bent Creek, Appomattox County.   He transferred to the 20th Va. Bn. Heavy Artillery as a 2nd Lieutenant, and by May, 1863, was captain of the Company.  He spent most of the war in the Richmond defenses.  Joining in the retreat to Appomattox in April, 1865, he was wounded in the upper left leg and taken prisoner at Sayler's Creek on April 6. Subsequently, his movements were thus:  IX Corps, 2nd Div., hospital, trans. to V Corps Hospital, City Point by April 14; trans. via State of Maine Hosp. steamer to Lincoln U.S.A. Gen. Hospital, Washington, D.C. 5-22-65; took oath and released 6-9-65; transportation furnished to Appomattox Co. 6-10-65.