Confederate Heritage Month! 
provided by the:
Georgia Division of The Sons of Confederate Veterans
Confederate History and Heritage Month Committee

For 80 years, the main artery between Fort Bragg and Fayetteville was Fort Bragg Road and, since 1941, Bragg Boulevard.

Now that artery — named for a historical military figure — is giving up its role, or at least that is the plan.

When the military place becomes a closed post, the new connector will be an artery, even more venerable, known today as Murchison Road.

No problem. The route will continue to have military history in its name.

I’ll leave for another day the question of who among the myriad of Murchisons (black or white) gave his name to the road that angles down from Spring Lake to downtown Fayetteville, and which is destined to become a handsome “gateway” to the whole place.

But there are notable Murchisons with military records and with longtime Cumberland County connections going back to the War of Independence.

The most venerable would be Kenneth McKenzie Murchison (1748-1836), who came from Scotland to the valley of the Cape Fear several years before the War of Independence.

Unlike many of his newly-arrived Scots neighbors who were Loyalists, he was a Patriot, certified in the Cumberland militia, although without any known record of fighting.

When he died in 1836 at age 88, he got a Patriot’s eulogy. It said: “Another Revolutionary Patriot gone to sleep with his compeers beneath the silent clods of the valley.

By the 1840s, the Lower Little River Murchisons were prosperous antebellum cotton mill operators. They named their mill Manchester after the famous mill center in England. That remains a name on the land in northern Cumberland County.

The road from Manchester to Fayetteville was earlier called Manchester Road, but has been Murchison Road for at least a century.

Old Kenneth, the Patriot patriarch, lived to see two of his three grandsons who would claim military credentials on battlefields of the Civil War.

All three were born at the family ancestral home, Holly Hill, and grew up in the mill business. By wartime, however, they were living in Wilmington and New York.

The oldest grandson, Col. John R. Murchison, born before 1830, was mortally wounded June 1, 1864, while leading his 8th N.C. Infantry charging to plug a break in the Confederate line on the bloody slopes of the old Cold Harbour battleground outside of Richmond, Va.

His body was left behind Union lines, and despite a short truce arranged between none other than Ulysses S. Grant and Robert E. Lee, a burial party never found the corpse.

His family later erected a stately memorial monument in Fayetteville’s Cross Creek Cemetery Number 2.

You can see it today at the corner of Grove and Ann Street, the southwest corner of the cemetery.

The second Confederate brother, Col. Kenneth Murchison (1832-1904), had the misfortune of becoming a prisoner of war in one of the largest single surrenders of a Confederate unit in the war.

He was commanding the 54th North Carolina Infantry Regiment on Nov. 7, 1864, when the unit and several others were surprised by a nighttime federal encirclement at Rappahannock Station, Va.

Gen. Lee had miscalculated the Union army’s plan for crossing the Rappahannock River, and as a consequence the North Carolinians were trapped on the wrong side of the river.

More than 1,500 Confederates were captured.

Kenneth Murchison spent the rest of the war, 20 months, in the Union at a prisoner-of-war camp at Johnson’s Island in Lake Erie.

Murchison entered the Confederate army in 1862 after returning from his New York business career. He was a company commander in the 54th in the battles of Chancellorsville and Winchester. He rose to colonel of the regiment just before Rappahannock.

After the war, Kenneth Murchison lived mostly in New York and Wilmington as a well-to-do businessman of wide interests in banks, hotels, building supplies, insurance and real estate (at one time his hunting lands in western North Carolina included the summit of Mount Mitchell, the high peak east of the Mississippi).

In 1880, he became owner of famed Orton Plantation across the Cape Fear River from Wilmington and turned it into a show-case example of Southern architectural elegance. He lived there in retirement for more than 20 years before his death at 74 in 1904.

The youngest of the Confederate Murchisons, David Reid Murchison (1837-1882), was also in the 54th N.C. Regiment. At 24, he raised a company of Wilmington volunteers and fought with the 7th N.C. Infantry in the Seven Days Battle around Richmond, and at the battles of Antietam and Second Manassas.

Bad health kept him from the battlefield in 1864, and as a captain he was named inspector-general of the Commissary Department of North Carolina.

After the war, he was involved in the family businesses as president of the North Carolina Central Railroad. He died at 45 in 1882 while in New York.

An interesting sidelight to all this is the fact that neither of the Murchisons ever served with Confederate Gen. Braxton Bragg, the former Union officer whose name is on the post and the boulevard.