The letter behind the ballad describes two successive fights. Reading its internal clock changes which one sent the casualty list home.
Research and editorial review: Re Fagiano · Published September 1, 2026
Documentary verdict: In the text Wescott published in 1909 as a letter dated July 24, 1864, the fifteen-minute charge and the sentence “There will be mourning in Farmington” belong to the afternoon of July 21. The narrative then explicitly starts a new action “on the morning of July 22nd,” the Battle of Atlanta in which James B. McPherson was killed. Treating the Farmington passage as a July 22 incident conflates two consecutive engagements.
Place-name clarification: This is the Town of Farmington in Washington County, Wisconsin—not the separate Farmington in Jefferson County. Wisconsin’s volunteer roster places Ebenezer Westcott and Samuel McClements of Farmington together in Company E, 17th Wisconsin; Washington County’s historical record identifies Wescott in that town and regiment.
M. Ebenezer Wescott’s printed letter is headed “Camp Near Atlanta, Ga., July 24, 1864.” It first identifies the fighting heard on July 20 as the Battle of Peachtree Creek. It then says the regiment marched that night, reached Decatur the next morning, moved toward Atlanta and charged Confederate works at about two in the afternoon. That afternoon was July 21.
Only after describing the charge, its casualties and the night’s advance does Wescott write, “On the morning of July 22nd.” He then describes Confederate troops striking the Union rear, attacks on the XVII Corps, McPherson’s death and a day spent behind breastworks. Those are features of the Battle of Atlanta on July 22. The source therefore gives two dates for two actions, not two descriptions of the same day.
| Date | What Wescott’s published text says | What it establishes |
|---|---|---|
| July 20 | His unit hears heavy firing to the right but is not engaged; he identifies it as Peachtree Creek. | A fixed date inside the narrative. |
| Night of July 20 | The troops march, reach the railroad at Decatur the next morning and leave their knapsacks. | The next narrated day is July 21. |
| July 21, about 2 p.m. | They advance toward Atlanta, charge an outer Confederate position and drive its defenders away in less than fifteen minutes. | This is the action connected to the Farmington casualty sentence. |
| Night of July 21 | They move farther forward and occupy an abandoned Confederate line nearer Atlanta. | The first action is complete before the next dated passage. |
| July 22 | A new attack begins in the Union rear; Wescott describes the larger battle and McPherson’s death. | The Battle of Atlanta is a separate second action. |
The sentence that gave the song its title appears inside the July 21 sequence. Wescott reports four local men killed, three wounded and one missing, then writes: “There will be mourning in Farmington when the sad news reaches there.” The domestic scenes in the song are invented, but the community, the named casualty report and the central sentence come from this published text.
The National Park Service service summary for the 17th Wisconsin Infantry lists “Leggett’s or Bald Hill, July 20–21” and then separately lists the “Battle of Atlanta, July 22.” The NPS Georgia engagements index likewise places the engagement at Bald or Leggett’s Hill on July 20–21, while its Atlanta Campaign overview dates the principal Battle of Atlanta to July 22, 1864.
This independent chronology supports the distinction visible inside Wescott’s account. It does not, by itself, identify the exact earthwork his company charged. The safest wording is therefore: a July 21 charge during the operations at Leggett’s or Bald Hill, before the Battle of Atlanta on July 22. Naming a more precise location would require company- or brigade-level reports not established by the sources used here.
The correction is small on a campaign map and large for the source. If the action is labeled simply “Battle of Atlanta, July 22,” Wescott appears to contradict himself by describing company casualties and then saying that his company lost no one “that day.” Once the two days are separated, the apparent contradiction disappears: the named casualties belong to the July 21 charge; the no-loss statement belongs to his company’s experience behind works on July 22.
For the ballad, the distinction also sharpens the historical claim. “There Will Be Mourning in Farmington” is not a generic home-front story attached to a famous battle date. It grows from one soldier’s report of a shorter, less famous action immediately before that battle—the kind of action most likely to vanish when campaign history is compressed into named engagements.
The surviving online object is Wescott’s privately printed 1909 collection, not the original handwritten letter. Its introduction and its Shiloh sequence contain chronological problems documented in a separate source investigation. The July 21 conclusion is nevertheless stronger than the Shiloh attribution because it rests on an explicit multi-day sequence inside the Atlanta letter and agrees with the institutional chronology of the regiment.
That agreement does not authenticate every word, casualty spelling or remembered detail in the 1909 text. The names are reported here as Wescott published them. A complete verification would compare the Company E muster rolls, casualty returns, morning reports and any surviving manuscript letter. Until those records are assembled, the article distinguishes three levels:
Research status: open. Last reviewed September 10, 2026. Corrections, muster-roll references and manuscript leads are welcome through email.
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