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CAPTAIN JOHN MARTIN KINARD.

Captain John Martin Kinard was born July 5, 1833, in the section of Newberry County known as the Dutch Fork, a settlement of German emigrants, lying a few miles west of Pomaria.  In 1838 his father, General Henry H. Kinard, was elected Sheriff of Newberry County, and moved with his family to the court house town of Newberry.  Here Captain Kinard attended school until he was about seventeen years old, when he went to Winnsboro, S.C., to attend the famous Mount Zion Academy.  He entered South Carolina College in 1852, but left before finishing his college course to engage in farming, a calling for which he had had a passionate longing from his boyhood days.  Having married Mary Alabama, the daughter of Dr. P.B.  Ruff, he settled on his grandfather’s plantation now known as Kinards.  While living here his wife died, and a few years afterwards he married Lavinia Elizabeth, the daughter of Dr. William Rook.

When the State called her sons to her defense, he answered promptly, and enlisted as First Lieutenant in a company commanded by his uncle, John P. Kinard.  His company was a part of the Twentieth Regiment, Colonel Lawrence Keitt, and was known as Company F. During the first years of the war he was engaged with his company in the defense of Charleston Harbor, rising to the rank of Captain on the resignation of his uncle.

While serving with his regiment in Virginia, to which place it had been moved in 1864, Captain Kinard came home on furlough.  Very soon, however, he set out for the front again, and was detailed for duty in the trenches around Richmond.  While engaged here he made repeated efforts to be restored to his old company, and joined them with a glad heart in October, 1864.  On the 13th of October, a few days after his return, he warned his faithful negro body-guard, Ham Nance, to keep near, as he expected some hot fighting soon.  And it came.  The next day the enemy was met near Strausburg, and Captain Kinard fell, with a bullet in his heart.  He died the death of the happy warrior, fighting as our Anglo-Saxon forefathers fought, in the midst of his kinsmen and friends.  Ham Nance bore his body from the field, and never left it until he returned it to his home in Newberry.

Captain Kinard left three children.  By his first wife, a daughter, Alice, now the wife of Elbert H. Aull, Esq.; by his second wife, two sons, John M. Kinard, Commandant of the John M. Kinard Camp, Sons of Veterans, and James P. Kinard.

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CHAPTER XXXVII

Battle of Cedar Creek or Fisher’s Hill, 19th October, 1864.