June 27 

By: Isaac Scott

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          On this day in 1862, Lieutenant Colonel James T. Kell (1834-1910) of the 30th North Carolina Infantry was severely wounded by the fragmentation of an artillery shell at the Battle of Gaines Mill. Kell had studied medicine at Davidson College and was a wealthy, slave owning physician with a pregnant wife and an infant son in Union County when the war began. He was appointed Major of the 30th North Carolina Infantry on September 13, 1861, and was elected as Lieutenant Colonel on May 1, 1862. His regiment first saw combat at the Battle of Seven Pines on May 31, 1862, where it suffered minimal casualties. Soon after, the 30th North Carolina was assigned to Brigadier General George B. Anderson’s brigade. Under Anderson’s command, the 30th would be dispatched to attack the right flank of Union forces by General D.H. Hill at the Battle of Gaines’ Mill on June 27, 1862. Kell and his men had a short but intense engagement with Union troops, in which Kell was struck in the hand, leg, and hip by artillery fragments. He spent a year in recovery before eventually realizing that he would never be fit for combat again. He resigned his commission in August 1863. Kell resumed his occupation as physician, fathered nine more children, and served two terms in the state legislature. He retired from medical practice in 1895 and spent the final years of his life tending his farm, where he died on May 4, 1910.

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Kell was wounded by Union artillery fire at Gaines Mill.  

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Sources:

Weymouth T. Jordan, Jr., comp., North Carolina Troops, 1861-1865: A Roster, 8: 321, 412; William Thomas Venner, The 30th North Carolina Infantry in the Civil War (Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland & Company, Inc., 2018): 304; Charlotte Evening Chronicle, May 5, 1910; 1860 U.S. Census: Union County, North Carolina;