William Dunaway Marrable
William Dunaway Marrable was born in Alabama in May 1839. When he was six his parents brought him west to Union County, Arkansas, in about 1845, two years after El Dorado was laid out as the county seat. He grew up there and spent the rest of his long life within a few miles of it.
In the Civil War he served the Confederacy in Company A of the 13th Louisiana Battalion of Partisan Rangers, one of the mounted units the Confederacy raised for raiding behind Union lines. He enlisted at Berlin on 18 December 1862. Seven weeks later, on 10 February 1863, he was captured at Lake Providence, on the Mississippi in northeast Louisiana, where Union troops of Ulysses S. Grant's army were camped that winter during his campaign against Vicksburg, the river fortress that was the key to the Mississippi.
As a prisoner of war he was sent up the river to the Gratiot Street Military Prison in St. Louis, a Union prison in a converted medical college, on 21 February 1863. On 2 April he was forwarded east for exchange to City Point on the James River, where the two armies traded prisoners. He was exchanged on 5 May 1863. His family remembered the prison differently: his obituary said he "was taken prisoner at Lake Providence, LA and shipped to the Old City Prison in Washington D.C. and later paroled at City Point, Virginia."
After the war he married Julia Elizabeth Prothro, a Georgia-born woman nine years younger. Their first child, Jimmie, was born in 1866, and their last, Chatwin Emmett, in 1893, when William was 54. In between came Fannie Daisy, who died at two, Minnie Mae, Jennie Estelle, Donnie Bussey and Jack Allen, with sons named in 1922 as T. C. and J. A. and a daughter who became Mrs. J. F. Hanie.
He was of the Christadelphian faith, a small Bible-based church with no paid clergy. He lived southwest of El Dorado, and he died at home there on a Friday at the start of December 1922, aged 83. The El Dorado Times called him "a pioneer resident of Union County". "Funeral Services will be held from the Marrable home Sunday afternoon, and will be conducted by the Reverend John W. Teese, of Conway. Burial will be in the Bethel Cemetery south of El Dorado."
He left his widow, Julia Prothro Marrable; four sons, "T.C. and C.E. Marrable of El Dorado, D.W. Marrable of Fort Worth, J.A. Marrable of Magnolia"; and four daughters, "Mrs. W.C. Purdue, Miss Minnie Marrable of El Dorado, Mrs. J.F. Hanie and Mrs. H.L. DeFee of Forth Worth". His upright marble stone in the Bethel Cemetery bears the cross of the Confederate veterans' memorial and reads "PVT WILLIAM D MARRABLE CO A LA PARTISAN RANGERS CSA 1839 1922".
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Cite: Heirology, "William Dunaway Marrable (1839-1922)", https://heirology.com/ancestors/william-dunaway-marrable-1839-1922-29eb1c.