The Family of Col. Benjamin Lewis Blackford

I wrote about him a lot in my Running the Blockade blog back in November and December 2013.  I am having to go back to that time and redo my entries as I was unable to use paragraphs for seven months.  I was redoing an entry on him (he was not impressed with the Wilmington, N.C., area when posted there during the war.

So I looked him up on Find-A-Grave.  He was there, but there was no information about him, but I did find some history about him in 29 September 2010, Virginia Memory Out of the Box "A Surveyor's View of Wartime Virginia."

He was born in 1835 in Fredericksburg, Virginia, to William Matthews Blackford (1801-1864) and Mary Berkeley  Minor Blackford (1802-1898) who was an anti-slavery activist.  At age ten, Lewis and his family moved to Lynchburg, Va..

When the war began, Lewis and his four brothers joined the Confederate Army, despite their mother's strong pro-Union sympathies.  Lewis enlisted in Co. G, 11th Virginia in April 1861, but left in May to join the Confederate Engineering Corps and spent the war making maps in Virginia and North Carolina.

Lewis had the reputation in his family of being a little too easy-going.  Although two wartime romances ended badly for him (one of them was in Wilmington, N.C.), nether seemed to keep him down for long.

--Old Secesh