History

Seventeen-year-old Ezra Potts military career was short, a total of three weeks from the time he signed a piece of paper in Bedford County, Virginia until a .50 caliber ball tore a hole in his chest in the Battle of Harrisonburg on June 6, 1862.  He’d been assigned to Turner Ashby’s 58th Virginia Regiment, almost immediately, as a replacement for one of the thirty-nine men who had been killed on May 8 at McDowell.  His training had been succinct; a heavy sergeant had asked him if he knew how to shoot.  When Ezra nodded, the sergeant handed him a worn muzzle loader and said, “Shoot them that're in the blue jackets.”

As he recovered in a tent hospital east of Harrisonburg, he met Fedora Willis, a stunning beauty of sixteen whose family lived in a small cottage located at one of the many bends of the meandering Shenandoah river.  Even after the wound healed, Ezra suffered a hacking cough that would remain with him for the rest of his life.  In accordance with the traditions of the people in the valley and nearby Blue Ridge Mountains, he courted Fedora for a year before asking her father, Able, for her hand in marriage, and on the twenty-first day of September, 1863, they were married in a wedding party that lasted for three days.  Fearful that upon his recovery Ezra would be pressed back into service of the Southern Cause, he used the rattle in his chest to feign consumption, and they left for the west in the spring of 1864.