Will The Real Isaac Jones Please Step Forward?: Benjamin McClusky (1819-1862)

As I discussed in my last post, John P. Kennedy's first wife Mary Susan McClusky was the daughter of Benjamin McClusky and Sarah A. Howard. Her father Benjamin was born in Limestone County, Alabama in 1819 and was the third of eight children belonging to his parents William McCleskey and Elizabeth Proctor. During his childhood, the family would relocate to Lawrence County, Alabama and then to Lincoln County, Tennessee. It is here in Lincoln County that Benjamin would meet and eventually marry his wife Sarah A. Howard on September 28, 1840. Very little is known about his wife Sarah's early life other than she was born in Virginia around the year 1818.

Together Benjamin and Sarah would have five children: William Marion (1841), Sarah E. (1844), Joseph P. (1848), Mary Susan (1851), and Harriet A. (1856).

By 1844, the family would relocate to Pontotoc County, Mississippi. Benjamin McClusky makes his first appearance in the county records via the 1845 tax list for the county. His earliest known appearance in the county's land records involves a deed of trust between himself and a man named Isaac P. Carr dated June 1, 1852. In the document, Benjamin is guaranteeing the transfer of 103 acres of land to Isaac P. Carr who was the treasurer of the county school fund, against a loan of two hundred and fifty dollars. The land is described as being located in the southwest quarter of Section 3 Township 11 of Range 3 east. This piece of land lay to the southeast of the town of Algoma and it's location proves interesting when it comes to trying to locate the final resting place of Benjamin McClusky and his wife Sarah.

Township & Range Map for Pontotoc County, MS.

(red X marks location of land owned by Benjamin McClusky)

Civil War Enlistment Document for Benjamin McClusky

With the outbreak of the Civil War in 1861, Benjamin at age 43 and his oldest son William Marion McClusky would enlist with Company F of the 41st Mississippi Infantry Regiment CSA on April 1, 1862. The men in Company F were also known as the Pontotoc Grays. Benjamin's service would be very short-lived due to his contracting measles and being sent home where he would die from the disease on June 23, 1862. For his efforts, records indicate that Benjamin received a whopping sum of twenty-two dollars and seventy-three cents. In stark contrast, his son William would survive the entire war and ultimately be pardoned in Greensboro, NC as part of General Joseph E. Johnston's surrender to General William T. Sherman on April 26, 1865. In 1863, Benjamin's wife Sarah would petition the Confederate government for his pension and ultimately receive the sum of forty-three dollars and ten cents. After this point, Sarah would disappear from the county record apart from a possible listing on the 1870 federal census. Both her and Benjamin's final resting places are unknown, but I tend to believe they are buried in unmarked graves in a small cemetery south of their property known today as the McCleskey Cemetery. There is also the possibility they are buried in New Salem Cemetery in the southeastern part of the county near the community of Troy which is where two of their children, Joseph and Harriet, are buried.