A lame approach to Cheat Mountain |
Staunton, Va.'s Thornrose Cemetery is a stone's throw from my desk. Just over the hill. Some 1,700 Confederate dead are buried there. The general monument says that there are 20 Arkansas men among the named dead, but I am still looking for a roster.
Likewise, I've failed to turn up much on Sam Gaddy, who is buried here. Sumter Rowland, a private in the Third Arkansas Infantry, wrote his father that Gaddy had been killed between Lynchburg and Staunton. He was riding between two train cars that came uncoupled. He fell and his legs were crushed. He took 15 minutes to die.
Gaddy's name is not found in Third Arkansas Infantry rosters. A large Gaddy clan from North Carolina settled in Carroll County before 1850; one imagines that their sympathies ran Union. Other Gaddys appear in southeast Arkansas in the 1860 census, though there is no Sam of the right age. He might, at the time of the census, have been away at........