History of Lumsden's Battery, Confederate States of America : Civil War Classic Library

At the close of the spring term of the Circuit Court of Tuscaloosa County, Alabama, in May, 1861, Judge Wm. S. Mudd announced from the bench that Mr. Harvey H. Cribbs would resign the office of Sheriff of the County for the purpose of volunteering into the Army of the Confederate States and would place on the desk of the Clerk of the Court an agreement so to volunteer signed by himself, and invited all who wished to volunteer to come forward and sign the same agreement. Many of Tuscaloosa's young men signed the same day.By the end of the week following the list had grown to about 200 men. Capt. Charles L. Lumsden, a graduate of the Virginia Military Institute was commandant of Cadets at the University of Alabama and had been contemplating the getting up of a company for service in Light or Field Artillery and had been corresponding with the War Department and Army officers already in service concerning the matter.These volunteers, on learning this fact, at once offered themselves to Capt. Lumsden as a company of such artillery.Dr. George W. Vaughn, son of Edward Bressie Vaughn (who afterwards gave two other younger sons to the cause) and Mr. Ebenezer H. Hargrove, also of Tuscaloosa County, had married two Mississippi girls, sisters, the Misses Sykes of Columbus, Mississippi, and were engaged in planting in Lowndes County, Miss. Hearing of this Artillery Co. they sent their names to be added to the list. Dr. George Little, Professor of Chemistry in Oakland College, Mississippi, and his younger brother, John Little, Principal of the Preparatory Department, resigned their places and returned to Tuscaloosa to join this Company. Edward Tarrant, Superintendent of Education for Tuscaloosa County, had a flourishing educational institute called the Columbian Institute at Taylorville four and a half miles south of Tuscaloosa. He gave up his school and joined the Company, where two of his sons, Ed William and John F., afterwards followed him.