Atwood, William, 1844-1871

William Atwood was a U.S. Army officer who served in Mississippi during the Reconstruction era. Born on March 7, 1844, in Atwood joined the Union army in 1862 at the age of 18. He served with a Pennsylvania artillery unit, and eventually received a promotion to captain of volunteers and an appointment as an assistant adjutant general (administrative officer) in 1865. After the Civil War, when the federal government discharged volunteer units, Atwood took a commission as a first lieutenant in the regular army and served as an adjutant with the occupation forces in Mississippi during the late 1860s. Atwood then took an assignment on the staff of General Philip St. George Cooke, who was in command of the Department of the Lakes in the Midwest. He died on October 15, 1871, when the R. G. Coburn, a large ship carrying wheat, flour, and silver, sank in a terrible storm in Lake Huron, taking the lives of more than thirty passengers. He is buried, or memorialized, in Allegheny Cemetery in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. (Russ Green, “Shipwreck Vignettes,” NOAA Ocean Exploration; FindaGrave; Arizona Weekly Citizen, Tucson, AZ, November 18, 1871; Historical Data Systems, Inc., “American Civil War Research Database,” Ancestry.com)