The Posthumous Journeys of Hiram Granbury
General Hiram B. Granbury
Civil War soldiers killed in battle were often buried twice, first on or near the the battlefield and later in a family plot or national cemetery. Hiram B. Granbury, however, was buried three times in cemeteries to which he had no personal or military connection.
On November 30, 1864, General John Bell Hood ordered his Army of Tennessee to make a frontal attack against entrenched Union forces at Franklin, Tennessee. When the assault began shortly after 4:00 p.m., Brigadier General Hiram B. Granbury led his Texas Brigade into one of the fiercest face-to-face battles of the war.
Fighting continued into the night, ending only when Union General John Schofield managed to move his army across the Harpeth River toward the safety of Nashvillle, leaving 1,700 Confederate dead behind. Hiram Granbury was among them, struck down early in the battle as he urged his men to move forward.
The body of General Granbury, along with those of his chief of staff, Colonel R. B. Young; his division commander, General Patrick Cleburne; General Otho Strahl; and Strahl’s aid Lieutenant John H. Marsh lay on a porch at the Carnton Plantation the morning after the battle.* They were soon transported thirty miles south to Columbia, Tennessee, placed into coffins, then taken to Buena Vista, the home of Mrs. Mary R. Polk of the influential Polk clan that included former U. S. President James K. Polk and Episcopal bishop/CSA general Leonidas Polk. Records are unclear regarding the location of the Young and Marsh coffins the night of December 1, but those of Granbury, Cleburne, and Strahl were in Mrs. Polk’s parlor.
In his memoir/diary, Reverend Bishop Charles Todd Quintard, chaplain and surgeon of the 1st Tennessee, writes of conducting two funeral services on December 2. The first was for Strahl, Marsh, and Captain James Johnston. The second, held at Mrs. Polk’s home, was for Granbury, Young, and Cleburne. All but Johnston were buried in Columbia’s Rose Hill Cemetery.
Almost immediately mourners discovered their fallen heroes had been interred in a section of the cemetery designated for indigents and criminals. Mrs. Polk’s son, General Lucius Polk, who had retired to his nearby home after being mained at the Battle of Kennesaw Mountain, arranged for all five bodies to be reburied in the Polk family cemetery six miles south of Columbia.
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In reponse to significant westward mirgration following the Civil War, the Texas legislature platted new counties, designating the locations and names of county seats. The legislators often used this method to honor Confederate war heroes, as in the case of Hood County and its seat, Granbury.
Hiram Granbury had come to Texas from Mississippi in 1850 and settled in Waco, about 90 miles southeast of the town named after him in 1866. He had no personal connection with what is now Granbury and may, in fact, have never been in its vicinity.
Nevertheless, in 1893 city officials decided that Granbury belonged in his namesake community and sent Dr. J. N. Doyle to Tennessee to exhume the General’s body and bring it to Texas.** The city planned an elaborate reinterment for November 30, the twenty-ninth anniversary of Granbury’s death.
Doyle performed his task with an excess of efficiency, arriving in Texas with Granbury’s body a few weeks ahead of schedule. The president of the Fort Worth National Bank offered his bank’s vault as a temporary resting place for the general.
In Fort Worth on November 20, 1893, a procession of Confederate veterans followed a hearse bearing Granbury’s Confederate-flag draped casket to a reserved train. A crowd of 5,000 awaited the train’s arrival in Granbury to pay tribute to the general. Following a service including eulogies from both Confederate and Union veterans, General Hiram B. Granbury was lowered into his third— persumably his final— resting place.
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* Many historians have claimed the bodies of five of the six Confederate generals killed at Franklin lay on the Carnton porch, but recent research disputes that contention. See “The Myth of the 5 Dead Rebel Generals” by Col. Campbell H. Brown in Civil War Times, February 1998.
** In 1870, Cleburne was reburied in Helena, Arkansas, his prewar home. About 1900, Strahl’s body was reinterred in Dyersburg, Tennessee where he resided before the war.