Dr. Alfred H. Graham (1824-1895) - Physician and Civil War Veteran

 

PCA Archives

Alfred Hamilton Graham was born about 1824 in Beattie’s Ford, Lincoln County, North Carolina, to John Davidson Graham and his first wife, Ann Elizabeth Connor. 

Ann Elizabeth died in 1836 after bearing fourteen children. John Davidson Graham remarried but died in 1847. The federal census of 1850 shows Alfred living with his step-mother, Jane Elizabeth Johnston Graham, and three half-siblings. 

In 1853, Graham enrolled in the University of Pennsylvania. Two years later, he received his medical degree. From 1856 to 1857, he was an assistant surgeon at Blockley Hospital, Philadelphia.

It is not known exactly when or why Graham came to be in Texas. However, by 1860 he was accompanying George Wythe Baylor’s Rangers as a field surgeon while the Rangers patrolled the western frontier of Texas to protect settlers from the Comanches.  

Graham was in Georgetown, Williamson County, Texas, when he married Mary Louise Mason on March 20, 1861. Their first son, Charles, was born in February of the following year.

On March 15, 1862, Graham joined the Confederate Army, enlisting in Company F, 18th Texas Cavalry (Darnell’s Regiment) as ‘acting surgeon’.  His unit was already fighting in the eastern United States as part of the Army of Tennessee when Vicksburg fell in July, 1863.

As the war ground on, recordkeeping in the Confederate Army became rather spotty.  No discharge papers for Graham have been found; however, owing to the fact that Graham’s wife gave birth to a daughter, Mary, on May 31, 1864, it seems likely that Graham was back home in Texas by September, 1863. The Grahams had two more sons in 1865 and 1868.

After the War, Graham resumed his medical practice and also purchased land in Williamson County.  An amateur archaeologist, he excavated and identified some cretaceous-period fossils and sent them to his alma mater in 1874.  He is also said to have written and published a number of accounts and articles about his Civil War experiences.

By 1880, Graham and his wife had also added three more children—Maggie, Mary Louise and James—to the family.  Graham continued to practice medicine in Bagdad and Lampasas, Texas, until about 1890.

Graham was in Phoenix when he died pneumonia on May 3, 1895.  He may have gone there in 1894 for his health.  There is some disagreement over whether he died of consumption, pneumonia, heart failure--or all three.  He was buried in Porter Cemetery under the auspices of the Odd Fellows, the Masons and the Ex-Confederate Association.

Graham’s widow Mary was still living in Houston, Texas in 1919.  She died in Williamson County in September, 1923.

A Graham family photo from 1881 is in the archives of the Pioneers’ Cemetery Association, Inc.

- by Donna L. Carr