Loughborough, James M.
Born: 1833-11-02 Shelbyville, Kentucky
Died: 1876-07-31 Little Rock, Arkansas
Flourished: Saint Louis, Missouri
James M. Loughborough was a federal government official, lawyer, real estate agent, Confederate Army officer, and the son of John L. Loughborough. Loughborough left college at the age of nineteen to work as a clerk for his father, who was surveyor general of Illinois and Missouri. He married Mary A. Wester in St. Louis in November 1857, and the couple had several children. In 1860, Loughborough was a real estate agent in Carondelet Township, St. Louis County, Missouri, and owned real property valued at $30,300 and had a personal estate of $1,600. Upon the commencement of the Civil War, Loughborough backed the Confederacy, enlisting in the Confederate Army with the rank of captain. He served as assistant adjutant general for Francis M. Cockrell and Sterling Price, and spent a day—July 4, 1863—as a prisoner of war in Vicksburg, Mississippi. Mary Loughborough accompanied her husband on his war travels and kept a diary during the siege of Vicksburg, from which she prepared her book,
James Grant Wilson and John Fiske, eds., Appletons' Cyclopaedia of American Biography (New York: D. Appleton, 1888), 4:33; Missouri, U.S., Marriage Records, 1805-2002, 10 November 1857, St. Louis County (Provo, UT: Ancestry.com Operations, 2007); U.S. Census Office, Eighth Census of the United States (1860), St. Louis County, MO, 176; U.S. Census Office, Ninth Census of the United States (1870), Carondelet City, St. Louis County, MO, 142; List of Staff Officers of the Confederate States Army (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1891), 100; U.S., Civil War Prisoner of War Records, 1861-1865 (Provo, UT: Ancestry.com Operations, 2007); Bloomington Pantagraph (IL), 2 August 1876, 1:5; Gravestone, Mount Holly Cemetery, Little Rock, AR.