Jefferson M. Lamar
Born in Milledgeville, Jefferson Mirabeau Lamar (1835-1862) was the son of Lucius Quintus Cincinnatus Lamar and Sarah Williamson Bird Lamar. An attorney, he volunteered for service with Cobb’s Georgia Legion at the outbreak of the Civil War. Commissioned a captain in August 1861, he rose to the command of the Legion infantry by January, 1862 with the rank of lieutenant colonel. He sustained a mortal wound at Crampton’s Gap on September 14, 1862 and died the following day.
Born at his family’s Fairfield plantation outside Milledgeville on January 3, 1835, Jefferson Mirabeau Lamar enjoyed the benefits of birth into one of Georgia’s wealthiest and prominent families. Educated at the University of Mississippi, he opened a law office in Covington, Georgia. He married Mary Ann Lamar in July, 1861 in the home of her step-father, John B. Cobb, and her mother, Mary Athena Jackson Lamar Cobb. He volunteered for service with Cobb’s Georgia Legion at the outbreak of the Civil War in 1861 and received a captain’s commission to command a company dubbed the Lamar Infantry. He enjoyed great popularity with the Legion officers who elected him battalion major on November 16, 1861. On January 18, 1862, he assumed command of the Legion infantry battalion with the rank of lieutenant colonel. He sustained a mortal wound while leading his outnumbered unit in the desperate fighting at Crampton’s Gap during the Antietam campaign on September 14, 1862 and died the following day. Initially buried behind the German Reformed Church near the battlefield, Union authorities relocated Lamar’s body to the Washington Confederate Cemetery. Following the war, the family brought him home to Oconee Hill Cemetery. According to legend, Lamar’s ghost haunted the house where he and his wife married until its demolition in the 1970s. Recalling his younger brother, United States Supreme Court Justice Lucius Quintus Cincinnatus Lamar II lamented, “I never knew a more perfect being from the time of his childhood up to the day of his death.”
