Confederatevets.com

At the beginning of the war my father, Dr. T. P. Dargan, was surgeon of the 21st South Carolina Volunteer Infantry, serving in Virginia; but this regiment was subsequently transferred to Morris Island, near Charleston, S. C. In 1863 soldiers being furloughed home on account of disability from wounds, sickness, and other causes had a long, tedious trip to Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana, as there was no railroad then crossing North Carolina westward. The only railroad running south and southwest was by Florence, S. C., and many of these soldiers died from exhaustion ere they reached the shelter of home. My father, who was still surgeon of the 21st Regiment, conceived the happy idea of establishing a wayside hospital at Florence, then in Darlington County, on the railroad, where these unfortunate soldiers might be treated before they succumbed to exhaustion on their homeward journey. He carried out this idea successfully and unaided. The hospital was established, and thousands of Confederate soldiers whom he brought back from the grave, as it were, rose up and called him blessed. He was more valuable to the Southern Confederacy than a hundred soldiers on the battle field, yet to this day no public record has ever been made of his philanthropic services.

I was a boy of twelve years of age when the war closed. One Sunday morning in the month of April, 1865, just a short while before the surrender, I saw a detachment of Sherman's Cavalry-probably a part of Kilpatrick's command-come through our town, They had an engagement with Johnston's command at Florence, ten miles south of this place, but nobody was hurt. On Serman's approach the Yankee prisoners, numbering some ten thousand, had been removed from Andersonville, Ga., to Florence, and this cavalry detachment was sent there to release those prisoners.