Algernon Sidney Reaves

Known by Sidney, from Randolph County, AL, he left Bowden College (GA) in June 1861 and was elected 2nd Lieutenant of Randolph Mountaineers on 19 July 1861 at Montgomery, AL, a company raised by Captain James Aiken (later Major, Lieutenant Colonel, and Colonel of the 13th), soon after Company D of the 13th Alabama Infantry. He was promoted to First Lieutenant in August (to date from 19 July 1861) and to Captain on 11 June 1862.

He led his company in Maryland and was in action with them at Turner's Gap on South Mountain on 14 September. He succeeded to command of the regiment as senior officer present after both Colonel Fry and Lieutenant Colonel Betts were wounded in action at Sharpsburg on 17 September 1862. He was himself wounded there.

He was furloughed for 30 days from a Richmond, VA hospital on 5 October 1862. He was back in command of the regiment at Chancellorsville, VA, in May 1863 and "at Gettysburg, in Archer's Brigade, he led his regiment [after Col. Fry's wounding] in the famous Pickett's charge, which resulted in the loss of four-fifths of his men. He himself was severely wounded ..." He was captured in the Wilderness, VA in May 1864 and was a prisoner at Fort Delaware to 16 June 1865 when he took an oath of allegiance to the United States and was released.

After being in the 'mercantile' business in Alabama, he married Mittie Hart in 1866 and moved to her family farm in Hartsville, Sumner (later Trousdale) County, TN by 1868. After her death in 1879, he worked his own place there.

In 1898 he was appointed Lieutenant Colonel of the 3rd US Volunteer Infantry for the Spanish-American War, and saw occupation duty in Santiago, Cuba until discharged in December 1898; he began receiving a US veteran's pension for disability from persistent malaria that same year.

In 1900 he was a "capitalist" boarding in John Dalton's hotel in Hartsville but he moved to Oklahoma and was one of the founders of the city of Lawton in 1901. By 1910 and to at least 1920 he was again a farmer, at Endee in Quay County, NM.

His service from his Compiled Service Records,1 online from fold3; some sources have him as a Major in Maryland or after, but he was not appointed to that rank. Personal details from family genealogists, J.M.K. Guinn's Randolph County, Alabama, Sixty-Two Years Ago (1894-1896), Luther B. Hill's A History of the State of Oklahoma, Illustrated (Vol. II, 1908), and the US Census of 1870-1920. His gravesite is on Findagrave; his son Winslow applied for his US veterans's grave marker in January 1930.

He married Martha "Mittie" Hart (1844-1879) in December 1866 and they had 2 sons.

His brother Whitfield was also in Company D.

06/26/1839; Wedowee, AL

03/17/1926; Denver, CO; burial in Hartsville Cemetery, Hartsville, TN