His face has been printed in books and used in films, but for decades, no one knew the name of the fierce-eyed Civil War soldier in the portrait, known only as “unidentified.”
But a chance encounter between an avid Civil War photography collector and Villa Rica, Ga., resident Patricia Mullinax at last allowed the Library of Congress, which has the portrait, to identify her great-great grandfather, Stephen Pollard.
Pollard was a Confederate soldier from Georgia with a thin moustache, wearing an old-fashioned tie, with a brace of pistols in his belt and an 1855 muzzle-loading pistol, with stock, in his two hands, according to the Washington Post. The young soldier went on to survive the Civil War — and eventually have his image featured in Ken Burns’s famous film on the conflict, becoming famous, but still unknown.
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