Thomas U. Camak

Son of wealthy professor and railroad founder James A. Camak (1795-1847), Thomas graduated from his father's old school a year after he died. In 1860 he was a prosperous 29 year old cotton factor (broker) at Columbus in Muscogee County, GA. He enrolled on 5 September 1861 and was elected Captain of Company A of Cobb's Legion Infantry.

He was wounded in action at Crampton's Gap on South Mountain on 14 September 1862 and captured there.

He was treated at the US 6th Army Corps field hospital in Burkittsville, MD then sent from Baltimore to Fortress Monroe, VA for exchange on 11 October. He arrived at Aikens' Landing the next day, was briefly in a hospital in Richmond, VA, then was furloughed home on 17 October. He was commissioned Major of the Battalion on 20 December (to date from 16 September) 1862 and was mortally wounded at Gettysburg, PA on 2 July 1863.

Thomas Camak, long the commander of the Mell Rifles*, was brought to the rear with a gaping thigh wound caused by a shell that had almost carried his leg away. Doctors could not control the bleeding or the pain, and Camak lay in agony for several hours before death finally came.

His service from his Compiled Service Records,1 online from fold3, as Thomas W. Camak. The quote above from John F. Stegeman's Athens at Gettysburg in The Georgia Review, Summer 1963. Personal details from family genealogists, the Catalogue of the Trustees, Officers, Alumni and Matriculates of the University of Georgia (1906), and the US Census of 1860. His memorial in Columbus, GA is on Findagrave.

He married Laura A Ragland (1833-1873) in May 1855 and they had 3 children; the first two, sons James and Thomas died very young. Daughter Annie died at age 27 in 1890.

*The Mell Rifles - later Company D of the Legion - were raised and named by Patrick Hues Mell, the Vice Chancellor of the University of Georgia in July 1861. Mell's son Benjamin, Captain Camak's First Sergeant, was killed at Sharpsburg.

09/13/1829 in GA

07/02/1863; Gettysburg, PA