Turner Ashby - Legacy

Legacy

Stonewall Jackson's report of the engagement sums up the man (although, considering Jackson's resistance to Ashby's promotion, the eulogy might be an exaggeration in favor of the young man):

As a partisan officer I never knew his superior; his daring was proverbial; his powers of endurance almost incredible; his tone of character heroic, and his sagacity almost intuitive in divining the purposes and movements of the enemy.

Ashby was buried at the University of Virginia Cemetery, but in October, 1866, his body was reinterred at the Stonewall Cemetery in Winchester, Virginia next to the body of his younger brother Richard Ashby, who had died at Harpers Ferry in a skirmish with Union soldiers in 1861. The Turner Ashby Monument can be found in Harrisonburg, Virginia at the spot where Ashby was fatally shot in the Battle of Harrisonburg at Chestnut Ridge.

Turner Ashby High School in Bridgewater, Virginia and Ashby Hall at James Madison University are named in Ashby's honor.

There is a tie to the naming of prominent Page County, Virginia businessman Major Ashby Roudabush (b. August 22, 1861 d. February 16, 1916). It seems that early in the war then Lieutenant Colonel Turner Ashby was riding with his regiment near one of the family's mills. Ashby saw the new child and asked if the boy had yet been named. When he learned that it had not, he pronounced that the boy be named "Major Ashby," for the boy could not outrank him.