Private Smith Holloway

Pvt. Smith Holloway

Private Smith Holloway was born c. 1815 in Franklin County, Virginia, and enlisted on January 18, 1865, in Smithland, Kentucky. Military records described him as 50 years old and 5’7.5” tall with black hair, eyes, and complexion. His occupation was listed as farmer. He mustered in the very same day to serve in the 13th Heavy Artillery Co. B, organized at Camp Nelson, Kentucky.

Just two weeks later, Pvt. Holloway died of pneumonia on February 1st, 1865. He was older than most soldiers, and probably not in the best of health, but he enlisted, nonetheless. He left behind a family.

-an unidentified USCT soldier

Smith Holloway’s family was likely enslaved in the years leading up to the Civil War, and there would be no record of his marriage. The 1870 Census identified a son of Smith Holloway, Ben Holloway, born in 1847, who would have been emancipated and on his own before he was twenty years old. At age 23 he was listed as married to Fannie Holloway, age 18, with two young children. Ben was a farm laborer in Trigg County, KY. Neither he nor Fannie could read or write. No additional records on this family were found other than a pension file submitted in1888 on behalf of son Ben Holloway, his sister Amy Holloway, and another brother identified as Sam Pielisson.

In 1890, another daughter, Mary Holloway Hawkins, applied for pension as a minor child at the time of her father’s death, twenty-five years prior. Witnesses to her application were her sister Amy Holloway and a Melvina Keney. Mary provided her marriage license showing her maiden name, and the date and location of her marriage to Damus Hawkins April 28th, 1885, at the storeroom of A. C. Mayes and Sons, Napier, Caldwell Co. KY. She was asked to provide information on her mother, and her mother’s marriage to the soldier, but there was none found in the record. It is likely that no such records existed. The Dept of the Interior, Treasury Department, acknowledged the satisfactory evidence in support of the previous claim made by the first three children, but appeared to deny the claim by Mary Hawkins.

Contributors: Laura Messerschmidt, and Sarah Plummer