The Gallant Pelham

This corner of Calhoun County honors a local boy the Confederacy turned into a legend. John Pelham was born near here in eighteen thirty-eight, went off to West Point, and left just before graduating to join the Southern cause. He became one of the great artillery officers of the Civil War, riding with cavalry commander Jeb Stuart and fighting alongside Stonewall Jackson.

At the Battle of Fredericksburg he held off a far larger Union force with just two guns, and General Robert E. Lee, watching, called him the gallant Pelham, the name that stuck. He was killed in eighteen sixty-three at Kelly's Ford in Virginia.

He was just twenty-four years old. A statue marks his grave in nearby Jacksonville, and monuments to him have stood, and in some cases been removed, across this region ever since.