Confederate's remains going home 138 years later
CULPEPER, Va. (AP) October 21, 2001 - After 138 years, Confederate Capt. William Downs Farley's dying wish is being granted. The remains of the South Carolina captain, killed in the Battle of Brandy Station and buried in a Culpeper family's plot, are going home.
A nine-member team of anthropologists from the Smithsonian Institution's Museum of Natural History recently removed Farley's remains from Culpeper's Fairview Cemetery. Soon, one of Confederate Gen. J.E.B. Stuart's most admired scouts will rest beside other family members in his hometown of Laurens, S.C. A funeral with full military honors will be held there after Doug Owsley, head of the Smithsonian's physical anthropology division, photographs and catalogs remains and artifacts taken from the grave. Farley's reburial will end a 17-year effort by Culpeper lawyer and Civil War historian Ed Gentry to honor the fallen Confederate.
``I think this is something that ought to be done,'' Gentry said. ``His wish to be taken home was the last wish of all 600,000 men who died in the Civil War.''
The night before the Battle of Brandy Station in June 1863, Farley handed his new blue overcoat to a Culpeper woman and said, ``If anything befalls me, wrap me in this and send me to my mother.''
He died on June 9, 1863, four hours after a Union cannonball hurled from Hansborough's Ridge about a mile away passed through his horse and severed his right leg at the knee. Farley, 28, was astride his mount, conferring with Gen. Matthew Calbraith Butler. While others were helping Butler, whose foot was blown off by the same cannonball, Farley asked Lt. John T. Rhett to bring him his severed leg.
``He took it,'' Rhett would later write, ``and pressed it to his bosom as one would a child and said, smiling, `It is an old friend, gentlemen, and I do not wish to part from it.'''
The excavation confirmed that part of the Farley legend. A shadow of black dirt in the red clay showed the captain lying with his left leg intact but his right one cut off at the knee. The imprint of his severed limb was clearly visible, resting close beside the left leg. But the excavation dispelled another part of the Farley legend: no brass buttons from Farley's blue overcoat were found.
The Confederate high command presented the coat to Stuart's scout before reviewing the troops at Brandy Station, in anticipation of Gen. Robert E. Lee's invasion of the North.
"Had Farley been buried in that
coat as he had requested, those buttons would almost certainly have survived,"
Owsley said.
Three glass underwear buttons were found in the grave along
with more than four dozen cut nails from Farley's coffin. The nails varied in
type, suggesting the coffin had been constructed of recycled parts during trying
times. All that remained of Farley were cranial bones, teeth and black dirt.
Owsley, an anthropologist involved in excavating Colonial
settlers' graves in the Starving Time Cemetery at Jamestown, applauded Gentry's
efforts to remove Farley's remains with care.
``If they are going to dig him up, we want to learn something
about him,'' Owsley said.
The anthropologist said the remains and artifacts would be
studied in his Washington laboratory, and a report would be issued in about two
months. At that time, Farley will be moved with an escort of Confederate
re-enactors back to Laurens, SC.
Although Farley's remains are now gone, his marble headstone,
considered a part of Culpeper history, will remain in place. Culpeper author
Virginia Morton is heading a drive to raise funds to place a flat marker atop
the spot from which the Confederate's body was removed. A similar marker will be
placed in Laurens, S.C.
Copyright 2001 Richmond Newspapers
Inc.
The above information, courtesy of the HPA, was submitted by Dr. Arnold M.
Huskins, a member of the Sam Davis SCV Camp #596 in Biloxi, Ms