By Donovan Webster | Dec 08/Jan 09 | 

A Life in Pictures

Collector David Vaughan keeps the memory of Civil War soldiers alive—and on display

And it’s a trip Vaughan is constantly ready to take. He considers a two-man portrait of the Hawkins brothers, from Oglethorpe, Georgia, who were attached to the 38th Georgia Infantry. The brother on the left—the lieutenant with bushy sideburns who is drawing his sword in the photo—was killed at the Battle of Winchester. The other brother, pulling his knife, survived the war. And then there is the tinted ambrotype of James M. Stedham, from Company F, 25th Alabama Infantry Regiment, Army of Tennessee. Decked out in a slouch hat and an eight-button tunic, he carries a rifle, a bowie knife, and a single-shot boot pistol. Captured at Resaca, Georgia, on May 15, 1864, he died of “acute dysentery” at a prison camp in Indiana the following year.

Another of Vaughan’s favorites is the portrait of the Patillo brothers: four Atlantans who joined Company K of the 22nd Georgia Volunteer Infantry. All four are shown holding their unsheathed bowie knives vertically; each knife’s D-shaped hand guard is shaped slightly differently from the others. “That’s because bowie knives were made by local blacksmiths, who fashioned their D-guards differently,” Vaughan says. “And look—John, the brother on the right, is also holding an Enfield rifle, while the brother on the left is holding a Confederate hand grenade. It’s the only photo of a Confederate hand grenade I know of.”

Three of the four Patillo brothers survived the war and returned home to have large families. “Those families are now spread out all over North Georgia,” Vaughan says. “And when this photo was published in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution a week before the opening of a museum exhibit devoted to the collection, I got a dozen phone calls from Patillo family members. With each of those calls, I thought: You see, these images aren’t just history. These men, in their own way, are all still very much alive.”