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Willard, Joseph Clapp
MILITARY SERVICE
Age: 0, credited to Hardwick, VT
Unit(s): USA
Service: comn 4/3/62; MAJ and ADC, USA, 7/15/62; resgd, 3/1/64
See Legend for expansion of abbreviations
VITALS
Birth: 11/11/1820, Vermont
Death: 01/17/1897
Burial: Oak Hill Cemetery, Washington, DC
Marker/Plot: Not recorded
Gravestone researcher/photographer: Janet Greentree
Findagrave Memorial #: 6825204
MORE INFORMATION
Alias?: None noted
Pension?: Not Found
Portrait?: Unknown
College?: Not Found
Veterans Home?: Not Found
(If there are state digraphs above, this soldier spent some time in a state or national soldiers' home in that state after the war)
Remarks: Co-owner of Willard Hotel, Washington, with brother Henry A. Willard. Brother Edwin D. Willard also served.
Joseph's tombstone photo offsite
DESCENDANTS
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BURIAL:
Copyright notice
Oak Hill Cemetery, Washington, DC
Check the cemetery for location/directions and other veterans who may be buried there.
Major Joseph C. Willard
(Library of Congress)
Biography
Antonia Ford lived at the home owned by her father, Edward R. Ford, located across the road from the Fairfax Courthouse. General J.E.B. Stuart was an occasional visitor at the home, as was his scout, John Singleton Mosby.
Federal troops occupied Fairfax in 1861, and Antonia Ford passed along to Stuart information on troop activity. Gen. Stuart gave her a written honorary commission as an aide-de-camp for her help. On the basis of this paper, she was arrested as a Confederate spy. She was imprisoned in Old Capital Prison in Washington, D.C.
Major Joseph C. Willard, a co-owner of the Willard Hotel in Washington, D.C., who had been a provost marshal at the Fairfax Courthouse, negotiated for Ford's release from prison. He then married her.
She was credited with helping plan the Confederate raid on the Fairfax County Courthouse, although Mosby and Stuart denied her help. She has also been credited with driving her carriage 20 miles past federal troops and through rain to report to General Stuart, just before the Second Battle of Manassas/Bull Run (1862) a Union plan to deceive Confederate troops.
Their son, Joseph E. Willard, served as lieutenant governor of Virginia and U.S. minister to Spain. A daughter of Joseph Willard married Kermit Roosevelt.
