Here’s a possible correction in the Afterword—not in the novel itself.
In the Afterword, I asserted that the grave of Colonel Kennon McElroy was unknown. It was as far as I knew at the time I wrote the novel. Apparently it is not unknown anymore.
McElroy was a University of Mississippi graduate and Lauderdale Station farmer killed commanding the 13th Mississippi Regiment in the attack on Fort Sanders.
“Most of the Confederates buried on the battlefield were transferred to a Knoxville Cemetery in the spring of 1864,” I wrote. “Many were never identified. Colonel McElroy’s descendents do not know exactly where he is buried.”
Apparently, however, at least some of them do. Probably shortly after the war, according to independent historian and reenactor Kenneth Robison II at Find-A-Grave, McElroy’s “remains were later brought back to Mississippi and buried at the Rose Hill Cemetery in Meridian” in Lauderdale County.
Several other grave registries at genealogical sites on the Web now also have McElroy buried at Rose Hill in Meridian. None did when I wrote the novel. But, curiously, neither Robison nor any of the others has offered a photograph of a tombstone for the young colonel who would have been 23 years old when he died. Is his grave unmarked?
I regret the error, if error it is.
