Page News & Courier

Heritage and Heraldry

Gallant leaders of the "Page Volunteers Company K, 10th Virginia Infantry

Article of December 18, 1997

In early May 1861, the "Page Volunteers" assembled under Captain William Townsend Young. The 57 year-old Young had established himself in Page County before the war as a successful merchant. The builder and owner of the fabulous "Calendine" estate, Young ran a general store and coach stop for the Burke Stage Line.

Dropped from the rolls the following spring, Young was succeeded by Rappahannock County born Richard Stewart Parks. Wounded in the right foot at McDowell in May, 1862, Parks later returned to duty until appointed the Enrolling Officer for Page County by order of the Secretary of War in 1863. Officially resigning as captain of Company K in 1864, Parks continued to make his life as an attorney in Luray. Serving as Attorney for the Commonwealth in Page in 1874 and in the Virginia House of Delegates from 1894 to 1900, Parks was known as a "striking character" and "an orator of no mean ability."

Parks was succeeded by the youngest of the "Page Volunteers" three captains and his own brother-in-law, David Coffman Grayson. The son of Page County Sheriff Benjamin Franklin Grayson, young David had also served as county sheriff. However, on the battlefield David Grayson had also made quite a name for himself.

In the post of 1st lieutenant at age 24, Grayson had been wounded at the battle of Cedar Mountain on August 9, 1862. Grayson took a number of months to recover from the wound he received in his right lung, finally returning to service in December. However, within five months of his return and within four weeks of his 25th birthday, Grayson was captured at the battle of Chancellorsville on May 3, 1863. Sent to Old Capitol Prison in Washington, D.C., David was soon exchanged and elected to the post of company captain on February 25, 1864. Once again however, the winds of war turned unfavorable during the following spring. Just over one year from the date of his last capture, Grayson was again captured on May 12, 1864 at the horrific battle of Spotsylvania Court House. This time his prisoner-of-war status was to continue significantly longer.

Sent first to Fort Delaware, Delaware, Grayson saw a long series of transfers from several prisons which included Hilton Head, South Carolina and Fort Pulaski, Georgia before finally returning to Fort Delaware on March 12, 1865. During his life as a POW, Grayson acquired the unwanted destiny of becoming a member of the "Immortal Six Hundred" which consisted of Confederate officer POW's who were confined in the stockade on Morris Island, South Carolina, under fire of their own guns shelling that island. With Robert E. Lee's surrender in April and the inevitability that the war was no longer a cause for prolongation in June, Grayson selected to take the Oath of Allegiance on June 15, 1865 and was released to return to his citizen life.

All three former captains of the "Page Volunteers" departed their mortal lives in the order they departed command of the "Page Volunteers." Young on February 11, 1880; Parks on March 27, 1922; and Grayson on June 26, 1833. Likewise, all three decided to be laid to rest in the soil of the county they had defended in the War Between the States and are all buried within site of each other in the Green Hill Cemetery in Luray.

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