Col. Charles F. Fisher-- Part 3: His Legacy

Charles Fisher was buried at the Old Lutheran Cemetery in Salisbury, North Carolina.  He became an early hero of the Confederacy with his death.  His troops erected a marker where he fell, which was later damaged by souvenir hunters and is now replaced by a U.S. flagpole.

His friend, Sewall Lawrence Fremont came to command the coast defense of North Carolina and named the defensive work at the mouth of the Cape Fear River's New Inlet Fort Fisher.

Later, the United Confederate Veterans and Daughters of the Confederacy established memorial markers.

North Carolina chief justice  Benjamin Franklin White, formerly a Confederate captain, published a laudatory  account of Fisher's death in 1901.

His hat is in the North Carolina Museum of History.

--Old B-Runner

Col. Charles F. Fisher-- Part 2: Railroad President and Killed at First Bull Run

Continued from May 27, 2021.

While still the North Carolina Railroad's president,  he was selected its principal contractor to build a line to Morgantown, North Carolina.  Slow construction progress and high costs produced much criticism, especially from Jonathan Worth, president of the competing Fayetteville  and Western Plank  Road Company and first postwar governor of North Carolina.

In 1859, despite Worth's criticism, the railroad stockholders reelected Fisher president.  During this time, Fisher also became friends with Vermont-born Sewall Lawrence Fremont, a former Army artilleryman who had become chief engineer  and superintendent of the Wilmington & Weldon  Railroad in eastern North Carolina in 1854.  The Wilmington and Weldon Railroad served as a major supply route of Confederate forces in Virginia and Lee's Army of Northern Virginia.

During the Civil War, Fisher became the commander of the 6th North Carolina Infantry Regiment.  He died leading a charge  on a Union battery at the First Battle of Bull Run, supporting  North Carolina  General Thomas Lanier Clingman as well as Fisher's cousin Jubal Early, who became a Confederate general after that.

Whether the fatal bullet came from friendly fire from the 4th Alabama or 2nd or 11th Mississippi or from the New York Zouaves or other Union soldiers from the Sudley Road will never be known.

--Old B-Runner