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| The Battle flag of Company K of the 10th Virginia Regiment is now preserved and on display at the New Market Battlefield Military Museum,New Market, Virginia. Battle flags are considered sacred and losing your flag is tantamount to losing the battle. All flags were to be surrendered at Appomattox but the flag of the 10th was hidden inside the jacket of the commanding officer, Lieutenant J. G. H. Miller, who took it home where it remained for several generations. |
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| My Grandfather, Benjamin Franklin Barham, enlisted in Company K, 10th Virginia Regiment, May 4th, 1861, at the age of seventeen, along with many other young men of Page County. They trained at Harper's Ferry and fought through most of the major engagements of the war. He was captured on May 12th, 1864, along with most of the regiment, at Spotsylvania Courthouse, taken to the Belle Plains depot, transported by steamboat to Camp Hoffman at Point Lookout, Maryland, and then transferred to Camp Chemung at Elmira, New York. Thirteen months later they were released under Oath of Allegiance on June 27th, 1865. Ben arrived in Washington, DC, on June 30th, went to the Provost Marshal's office and was given transportation home to Luray, Virginia. |
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| The below link to Barhams in the Confederate Army is just that, a list of all Barhams who served in the southern armies, east and west, during the war. You may be surprised and proud, as I was, at the number of Barhams who fought for the south. The link to the diary of Joseph Fant Kauffman is riveting reading. Kauffman served in Company K, 10th Virginia Regiment from March, 1862, to August, 1862, where he was killed in the Battle of Second Manassas. His diary is a great record of the life of a line soldier during that, or any, war. The drudgery of daily life and the horror of the fighting is clear in his text. He died while fighting beside my Grandfather, Benjamin Franklin Barham, and his last entry in the diary was "It is now sundown. They are fighting on our right. Oh, to God it would stop." |
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 by Gary Bruner in the Gettysburg Magazine Issue 31, July, 2004 |
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