GEORGE DIEFENBACH

Company C, 4th Kentucky Volunteer Infantry

   My great-grandfather George Diefenbach was born in the mid-1840’s in Hamilton, Ohio, of German-American parents. The family moved to Louisville, Kentucky when he was still a boy, and they lived in the Butchertown area of the city. As a teenager he was apprenticed to a barrel-maker in Bardstown, and allegedly it was here that he developed his southern sympathies. Family legend has it that at the time the Civil War broke out, George began observing Union military activity in Louisville to pass on to the Confederate authorities. Initially rejected for enlistment in the CSA army as being under age, his intelligence-gathering activities (and according to one account, a wound suffered in the course of same) gave him the credibility needed to be accepted as a recruit in the 1^st Kentucky Brigade.

   In any event, he did in fact enlist at Uniontown, Kentucky, in late September, 1861, at which time he would have been sixteen or seventeen. The record shows he was involved in the following engagements: Shiloh, where he was wounded; Vicksburg (prior to Grant’s campaign); Baton Rouge; Stones River; Jackson, Miss; Missionary Ridge and Chattanooga; Rocky Face Gap, Resaca, and Dalton, Georgia; Dallas to Atlanta; Peachtree Creek; and Jonesboro, where he was reportedly taken prisoner September 1, 1864.

   He returned to Louisville after the war, where he married and had a family and worked as a policeman on the city force. In those days Louisville policemen were still political appointees, so perhaps the Orphan Brigade connection was involved. My great-grandfather seems to have maintained contact with other veterans, as evidenced by bits of memorabilia that survive in our family—a button (Robert E. Lee’s image, "4^th Ky., Co. C") and membership information from the Confederate Veterans Association. In later years he was a tavern-keeper, and the establishment went by the name of the New Shiloh Inn.

Tom Heffron
Vancouver, BC, Canada

[email protected]

George Diefenbach
courtesy Tom Heffron

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