Christopher Pritchard Poppenheim

Great grandson of a Hessian soldier and son of a Charleston rice plantation owner and physician, he was educated in private schools and was a clerk in Charleston by 1860. He mustered as a Private in Company A of the Hampton Legion Infantry in 1861.

He was wounded - his arm "shattered" - while carrying the colors in action at Sharpsburg on 17 September 1862.

He was appointed 3rd Sergeant in 1863, returned to duty, and was with his Company into 1864 before being discharged for disability.

He sold his share of the family plantation to older brother John in about 1868, had a successful hardware store on King Street in Charleston until his death - an "importer and dealer of English and American hardware, bar iron" and "plows, guns, etc." - and was an investor and executive in local fertilizer manufacturing companies in the 1880s.

His service from the Rolls.1 Details from Joan Marie Johnson's Southern Women at Vassar: The Poppenheim Family Letters, 1882-1916 (2002), a bio sketch in The National Cyclopedia of American Biography (Vol. XVII, 1920), the Confederate Veteran (Vol. 25, January 1917), and the US Census of 1860 & 1900. His gravesite is on Findagrave.

He married his cousin Mary Elinor Bouknight (1837-1915) in November 1864 and they had 4 daughters, all of whom were Vassar graduates. The eldest, Mary Barnett Poppenheim (1866-1936), was President General of the United Daughters of the Confederacy from 1917 to 1919.

12/10/1839; Gallant Hill Plantation, North Charleston, SC

05/30/1901; Charleston, SC; burial in Magnolia Cemetery, Charleston, SC