A few independent sources allow the tracing of the last weeks in the life of Second Sergeant John W. Harrell of Company B, 26th Alabama Infantry. Sgt. Harrell, age 25, survived the first day of the battle of Gettysburg, but on the morning of the third day the brigade was called upon to assist in storming the enemy works on Culp's Hill. During this charge up the hill, Sgt. Harrell was wounded in the upper right arm, specifically his right humerus was fractured by a shot. He probably lay there on the side of the hill until the next day, when Union soldiers could safely leave their earthworks to retrieve the wounded in their front. Sgt. Harrell was transported about two miles to the George Bushman farm, site of the main hospital of the Union 12th Corps, where 125 or so other Confederates with severe wounds were taken, in addition to about a thousand federal wounded. There surgeon Henry Earnest Goodman of the 28th Pennsylvania, who was also the medical officer-in-charge of the hospital, excised Sgt. Harrell's humerus. On 12 July, amputation of the arm became necessary, which was accomplished at the shoulder joint. Unfortunately a hemorrage of the wound occurred a few days later and Sgt. Harrell died on 21 July, 1863. He was buried with at least 20 other Confederates in a location just east of Bushman's stone house. It so happens that Chaplain Lyman Daniel Ames of the 29th Ohio, who was assisting at the hospital, helped bury one unnamed Confederate on 21 July, one on 22 July, and two the morning of 23 July, so odds are that Ames personally attended the burial of Sgt. Harrell. His remains were exhumed after the war, in 1872, and reinterred at Hollywood Cemetery in Richmond, where he rests today. [Sources: 26th Alabama website, The Medical and Surgical History of the War of the Rebellion, Greg Coco's Gettysburg's Confederate Dead, Diary of Chaplain Ames, etc.]