My Genealogy Hound

JOHN B. PIRTLE was born in Louisville, May 17, 1842, and is a son of the late Dr. Claiborne and Eliza J. (Barbee) Pirtle. Dr. Pirtle was a man of high standing in this city and was a brother of the late Judge Henry Pirtle, and his wife, the mother of John B. Pirtle, is a sister of the Hon. John Barbee, and is a most estimable lady. John B. Pirtle is the only surviving child of his parents and was educated in this city at the Male High School. He volunteered as a private in the Confederate States army in September, 1861, and served until the close of the war in 1865, participating in almost every battle of the army of Tennessee. Soon after the battle of Shiloh he became attached to the staff of Brigadier General Hawes, but in a short time was ordered to duty as the acting adjutant of the Thirty-first Mississippi Regiment, commanded by Colonel Orr, and at the battle of Baton Rouge, August 5, 1862, he commanded the right wing of that regiment. When Bragg was in Kentucky, in the fall of that year, he obtained authority from the Secretary of War to raise a regiment in Kentucky, and started to that State, but on reaching Barboursville, Ky., he met Bragg’s army, leaving the State after the battle of Perryville. Under the act of Congress, authorizing the President to make appointments for “valor and skill,” he was commissioned a lieutenant in Company D, Fourth Kentucky Regiment, and immediately thereafter appointed aid-de-camp and provost marshal on the staff of Brigadier General Ben Hardin Helm, and served with that general until he was killed at Chickamauga. General Helm was giving an order to Lieutenant Pirtle at the time that he was shot. While the army was at Missionary Ridge, Lieut. Pirtle was adjutant of the post at Chickamauga Station, and when the army fell back to Dalton and went into winter quarters, there he became adjutant of the past at Dalton. On the opening of the Dalton and Atlanta campaign he was ordered to duty on the staff of Major General Bate, and served with that general as assistant adjutant general until the close of the war. He surrendered at High Point, N. C., May 3, 1865, and returning to Louisville in 1866, was made the general agent of the Travelers Insurance Company, of Hartford, Conn. The territory now controlled by him for that company embraces the whole South, east of the Mississippi River. He was married in 1874 to Miss Mary Belle Thomas, the second daughter of John H. Thomas, one of the leading merchants of Louisville, who died in 1877, and has two living children.