The Southern Democrat, 4 Aug 1927
Blount County Vet Has Bullet Removed. Our townsman, James R. Jenkins, 80 year old Confederate veteran underwent an operation at the Ralls Sanitorium in Gadsden on Wednesday of last week for the removal of a Yankee bullet that was fired through his left leg on April 9th, 1865. Mr. Jenkins did not know that the bullet was in his leg. It never bothered him until April 2, 1926 when he was attacked with pain. He assumed it was rheumatism and was treated for that malady. Recently he went to Gadsden to have X-ray pictures made of his leg and they disclosed the fact that there was a foreign substance in his left thigh. Even then he did not know that the 62 year old bullet was in his flesh. When the surgeons removed it however, he recalled the wound and told this interesting story:
He was a member of the sixty-second Alabama regiment which was then under command of Colonel Lockhart of Mobile. He was across the Mobile Bay from the city of Mobile when he was fired upon by Federal troops. This was before he and his comrades could surrender under the terms of the Appomattox treaty of three days before.
”I thought at the time that the bullet went through my gun, but as I lost the weapon I could never tell. It went through my right thigh and entered the left thigh. The surgeon of the regiment ran his finger into the hole and said the bullet was not there. I believed him because I could not feel it. There was never any trouble from it until two years ago when I thought I had developed rheumatism in my left foot. I could not walk on it and the pain was dreadful at times.”
James Ransom Jenkins was born in 1847 and died in 1938.