The Mystery Solved

By Michael D. Martin, E.C.P.D. Retired

About the author...Michael Martin (pictured front row, far right in the 1981 photo) is a retired veteran of 25 years on the Eden City Police Department, and has penned a number of anecdotal writings recalling his experiences.

XLVII. The Mystery Solved

Many years ago...actually, many many years ago...I was a child and my grandmother, Rosie Dehart Martin cared for me while my mother worked in the mills and my dad worked as a carpenter. One morning we were sitting around the floor furnace on a stool and I was telling my grandmother about my dad being a soldier, she already knew. and Rosie said "Poppy war a soldier too! Poppy fit the yankees..They sent poppy to a battle at a big mountain in Tennessee and poppy got hurt thar...they brung poppy back to Virginia and when he was well, poppy could not be a soldier no more. They tried to send poppy home but poppy would not go, so they made him a guard at the prisoner camp at Danville, Virginia and that's where poppy war when the war ended...

Forty years later, I had visited poppa's grave in Patrick county many times, his stone was donated by the daughters of the confederacy. It said A.J. Martin Co-I 6TH VA. RES. CSA and I ordered a book from the Eden Library "a compendium of Virginia Military Organization, 1861-1865" it showed that the sixth Virginia Reserves were presented to Govenor Wise in November of 1864 and were to be used in battle only if the war came to Virginia....duh!!

For twenty years, I had a mystery. I had poppa's application for benefits as a Virginia soldier and in his own handwriting, he swore he had been a soldier of Virginia for eighteen months, but the compendium of Virginia said that the sixth Virginia reserves had ben mustered into service in November 1864. There was twelve months missing. It was a mystery for ten years or more. I looked everywhere and found it by accident, I had a great great uncle, Jesse Greene DeHart who was killed, serving with company A of the 24th Virginia as they made the great charge at Gettysburg, I found him in the archives and I decided to look further for more DeHart boys...what I found was...Andrew J. Martin Patrick County, twelve mos. service Company H

24th Virginia Volunteers...Kemper's Brigade. After a hundred and fifty years, I found the missing year....poppy is buried under the wrong tombstone, 24th Virginia was sent to Lookout Mtn. with Longstreet to assist Bragg in holding Tennessee for the Confederacy, Nov. 1863.

Michael D. Martin

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