James R. Durham

His Story

James Robinson Durham was born in Richmond on February 7, 1833. He was schooled in the city and learned the drug business there. In 1858 he moved west to Clarksburg, in the mountain counties that would refuse to follow Virginia out of the Union, and he was still living there when the war began. He sided with the Union, and in 1862 he was commissioned a second lieutenant in Company E of the 12th West Virginia Infantry, a company recruited in Harrison County, of which Clarksburg is the seat.

The following June, the 12th West Virginia was part of Robert Milroy's garrison at Winchester, at the northern end of the Shenandoah Valley. Richard Ewell's Confederate corps, the head of Lee's march toward Pennsylvania, moved north through the valley and closed around the town. On June 14, 1863, in the fighting that became the Second Battle of Winchester, Durham led his command over the stone wall and was wounded. The garrison was overrun. Thousands of Milroy's men were taken prisoner. The survivors fell back some thirty miles to Harpers Ferry. West Virginia became a state six days later.

Durham recovered and served to the end of the war. His Medal of Honor was issued on March 6, 1890, nearly twenty-seven years after Winchester. He died in Washington on August 6, 1904, at seventy-one, and is buried at Arlington National Cemetery.