Biography|Jesse Lee Reno — The Monument That Names the Spot but Not the Shot

A monument on a battlefield is supposed to settle something. This one settles the spot and leaves the rest open.

Survivors of the Ninth Army Corps put up a stone shaft at the crest of Fox's Gap and cut its east face with the date they dedicated it: 14 September 1889, twenty-seven years to the day after the fight.

Its west face says the monument marks the spot where Major General Jesse Lee Reno, commanding the Ninth Army Corps, was killed in battle on 14 September 1862. It does not say who killed him, and the record has never agreed.

Reno was born at Wheeling, in Virginia, on 20 April 1823, and grew up around Franklin, Pennsylvania. He entered West Point in 1842, graduated eighth in a class of fifty-nine, was brevetted twice in Mexico, and took command of the Ninth Corps at the opening of the Maryland Campaign.

Confederate general Daniel Harvey Hill's official report credited the shot to the 23rd North Carolina.

Ezra Carman, a Union officer whose manuscript history was finally published in 2010, placed it with troops of John Bell Hood's command firing from the treeline.

Writing in 1996, the historian John Michael Priest has a soldier of the 35th Massachusetts firing into the dusk at men he took for Confederate cavalry.

The Civil War Trails marker a few paces away says only that Reno was hit by Confederate volley fire.

A bronze plaque raised in 2006 in Reno, Nevada — a city the Central Pacific Railroad named for him — says Confederate sharpshooters.

Five accounts, one shot, and no way now to choose between them.

The trailside marker also prints the line his friend Samuel Sturgis remembered him saying when the stretcher reached the command post: "Hallo, Sam, I'm dead!" It survives on Sturgis's word alone.

Reno's body went to Boston first, to a vault at Trinity Church. In April 1867 it was moved again, to Oak Hill Cemetery in Georgetown, where it remains.

The monument still stands at the junction of Reno Monument Road and Lambs Knoll Road, with room for two or three cars.

West Virginia raised its own marker to him at Wheeling in 2008, giving his birthday as 20 June — the only record that does. It is currently listed as missing.

📸 Cover: the Reno Monument at Fox's Gap, South Mountain (Acroterion, 17 April 2011, CC BY-SA 4.0).