In May 1861 the 4th Tennessee mustered at Germantown with 963 men. By the end of 1862 it had lost so many that it was joined to the 5th Tennessee to make one regiment. By April 1865, what was left of both regiments made up a single company, and scarcely a man in it had not been shot at least once.
The Morton Museum's roll of the Wigfall Grays, written out by a Collierville hand in the 1890s, lists eighty-six names. Beside them, the notes read like the war itself. Eleven men were killed in battle or died of their wounds, at Shiloh, at Perryville, at Atlanta. Two died in a hospital or a prison camp. Sixteen more are marked only "died," some of them perhaps after the war, some of them almost certainly of the sickness that killed more soldiers than bullets did. Sixteen were wounded, two of them twice. Four were captured. Ten deserted or were dropped from the rolls, five were discharged, five were transferred, and one hired a substitute and went home. The roll is not complete: the soldiers' index of the National Park Service lists about 128 men under the company.
The survivors came back to a town that had been occupied, fortified and burned. They rebuilt it around a new square. Eleven of them lie in Magnolia Cemetery, among them Captain Wiley T. Cargill, who led the company through most of the war; Hezekiah Halley, captured at Atlanta; and Corporal Merritt Brown, whose comrades chose him for the Roll of Honor.
Hezekiah Halley lived until 1926. In 1922, answering a state questionnaire for Confederate veterans, he could name only five or six old soldiers still living in Collierville. He closed with a regret: the time for a true history had passed. The men who could have told it were dead, and the ones still living had forgotten.
This site is an attempt to gather what is left.
Sources: Morton Museum of Collierville History, manuscript roll of the Wigfall Grays (2011.04.02); Luke W. Finlay, "Fourth Tennessee Infantry," Military Annals of Tennessee (1886); H. S. Halley, Tennessee Civil War Veterans Questionnaire (1922); National Park Service, Soldiers and Sailors Database.
The story of Corporal Merritt R. Brown, the Wigfall Grays and their town is told in An Honor Unearned: From the Streets of Collierville, Tennessee, to Edgefield, South Carolina, by Michael Louis Meece. Available on Amazon in paperback and Kindle. More about the book at anhonorunearned.org.