Before he was executed by firing squad, one Lawrence County man took a last long drink of water–from his own grave.

William Carroll Rowland was a simple man who lived a relatively quiet life. Illiterate and poor even by the standards of a community of poor farmers, in the years before the Civil War, he lived in a ramshackle dogtrot cabin on Granddaddy Road with his wife and four children.

Rowland was no great supporter of the Confederacy. Payton Sowell, writing in the ‘Lawrence Democrat’ almost six decades after the Civil War, said that the impoverished farmer was opposed to secession, but that he feared to make his sympathies known, so he determined instead to join the Confederate army, which he did in November 1861.

After he enlisted, Rowland turned to a crowd of onlookers and said resignedly, “Take care of my family.”

Unfortunately for Rowland, enlisting in the Confederate army was the first in a series of poor choices that lead to his ultimate demise; a demise which would be sanctioned by six Confederate generals and the Confederate War Department.

At some point over the next winter–probably after the Confederate defeat at Forts Henry and Donelson–Rowland deserted his unit in the 54th Tennessee Infantry and, as the remarks on his muster role say, “joined Lincoln’s army.”

Desertion was a capital offense in both armies during the Civil War. If a soldier were caught after deserting, he could be–and often was–executed by his own men.

On the first day of the Battle of Shiloh, Rowland, who was now fully a Union soldier, was captured and taken prisoner with a group of other Union soldiers. When he was recognized, the wheels of military justice turned swiftly.

General Order Number 12 of the Confederate Army of the Mississippi was the death warrant of Carroll Rowland. He was sentenced to death at 4:00 p.m. on April 12, 1862 at Corinth, Mississippi. As can be seen here, the order was approved by Confederate generals Polk, Bragg, Hardee, Breckinridge, and Slaughter, as well as one illegible name and the Confederate War Department.

Payton Sowell recalls in his 1919 ‘Democrat’ article that Rowland’s grave was dug on the night of the 11th, and that by the next morning, it was partially full of water due to the high water table of the area.

As Rowland sat upon his coffin, awaiting his execution and no doubt thinking of the wife and large family he was leaving behind in that dogtrot cabin on Granddaddy Road, the burial detail began to scoop the water out of his grave.

It was then, as he watched the water being pulled from the fresh earth, that Rowland asked if he might have a drink from it. One of the burial detail obliged, and so it came to be that Carroll Rowland of Granddaddy Road awaited his death on that spring day in 1862 by drinking water from his own grave.

Rowland was executed by firing squad and buried that day as the Tennessee regiments watched. His wife Eliza, widowed at the age of 26, was left with four children, three of whom were 5 years old or younger.

Rowland’s old cabin is most assuredly long-gone by now. Payton Sowell estimated that it probably stood about six miles from the city limits of Lawrenceburg, and that in 1919, the wooded and rugged place had been cleared and was growing thick with cotton and corn.