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| We dare speculate that one of the Hill listings in the 27th Regiment of over 1700 young men organized in January 1864 may include the ancestor of Cora Lee Hill Atkins. A review of the many battles engaged and territory traversed indicates that said unit may have traveled through southwestern Virginia and the Roanoke-Salem area previously mentioned.
General Philip Sheridan was given the responsibility to close the great Shenandoah Valley as food basket for the Confederates; and, he did so by extensive raids and battles that engulfed hundreds of towns like Salem in both the upper through lower end of the valley even into North Carolina. His army included U.S. Colored Troop regiments such as the 27th Regiment formed in Ohio specifically for a war of movements that would exhaust and ultimately defeat the rebel armies. If the oral history story handed down about the ancestral mother awaiting return of ancestral father who was in the Union Army, ... it is highly possible one of the below men with surname of Hill was the person we seek. And, if so what occurred after a child was born around 1865-1866? Did the father live in the Salem vicinity or return to Ohio where he was mustered out to live there and possibly have a second family? We do not know but dare not ignore the realties that thousands of young women across the southern slave states gave birth during and immediately after the Civil War, ... and without fathers' knowing or present.
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