The Daguerreotype By Linda H. Barnette
It all began many years ago when my grandmother, Blanche Dwiggins Smith, gave me a daguerreotype of one of her ancestors who was killed in the Civil War. I wish I had asked her more about it, but being young and busy earning a living, I did not have time to pursue the subject and just let the picture stay in a dresser drawer. Now that I have retired, I devote much of my time to genealogy and writing. So I have not only discovered who was in the picture, but that information also led me to find out how many others from her family fought in the same war. The family information shared here is my own, but the specifics about the dates and regiments came from the North Carolina State Department of Archives and History.
As it turned out, the daguerreotype is a photo of her grandmother’s brother, John Leach. He was born in Davie County in 1831, the son of James Leach and Mary Kurfees of the area known as Calahaln. A farmer as were most people in that era, he married Mary Warren in 1956. He enlisted in the Confederate Army as a private on August 6, 1861, in Company F, 13th Regiment of North Carolina soldiers. He rose quickly in the ranks, became a sergeant, and served until wounded in the Battle of Chancellorsville, Virginia. Death followed in the army hospital in Richmond on August 23, 1863. Apparently, he was buried in Virginia because there is not a cemetery location here in his home county.
John’s brother David, also my grandmother’s great-uncle, was a farmer here in Davie County who married Mellina Warren in 1842 and enlisted in the Confederate army at age 25 in 1861. As fate would have it, David was wounded on the same day and in the same battle as his brother John. He, however, even after being wounded again in October of 1864, lived to return home. When he did, he resumed farming, and he and Mellina had five children. David died in 1892 and is buried along with most of my Dwiggins relatives in the Center United Methodist Church Cemetery in Mocksville, NC.
One other Leach brother also served in the war after enlisting as a teenager. James Leach, born here in 1844, was listed as a farm laborer on his father’s farm and joined the Confederates. He was killed at Cold Harbor, Virginia, on June 1, 1864. The place of his burial is also not known. I can only imagine the grief and suffering of his parents and other family members upon losing not one, but two, young men in a war in which they likely had no stake. They were not, to my knowledge, slave owners themselves, but those young men apparently felt the call of duty to serve the South at that time. I will never forget the face in the picture: so young, so innocent, and so doomed.