One of the odd post-battle stories involves the return of David Winn’s body from Blocher’s Knoll. The officer’s body made it home . . . without his gold dental work, which had been retained by the Blocher family. The incident made headlines and inflamed feelings in the South. Often lost in the story is this: who was David Winn?
If you walk the ground north of Gettysburg—out past the town, toward the rolling rises that would later be called Barlow’s Knoll—you are standing where Lt. Colonel David Winn of the 4th Georgia met his end on July 1, 1863.
He was not a boy. Not a farmer pulled suddenly into war. Not a man learning leadership on the fly.
He was a physician. Educated. Married into a prominent Georgia family. A man who wrote thoughtful letters about discipline, morality, and death—and then died violently in the first day’s chaos.
And after he died, his story did not end cleanly. It lingered. It rotted a little. It got tangled up in money, resentment, and—most famously—his gold teeth.
From Camden to Georgia: A Southern Professional Class Life
David Read Evans Winn (the full name matters—it tells you where he came from) was born around 1831 in Camden, South Carolina. His family wasn’t obscure. His father, John D. Winn, moved the family into Georgia and held local office in Houston County. This was a family with standing—legal, civic, and connected.
The “Read Evans” portion of Winn’s name likely ties him to a broader South Carolina political lineage, suggesting a family conscious of heritage and status.
By the early 1850s, Winn had done something relatively rare: he became a doctor.
In 1852, he graduated from Jefferson Medical College in Philadelphia—one of the better medical institutions in the country at the time. That alone tells you something about him. This was not a backwoods practitioner. He had formal training, northern education, and access to resources.
By the mid-1850s, he had settled into Americus, Georgia, practicing medicine and moving within respectable circles. In 1854, he married Frances M. Dean, daughter of a prominent Macon-area family. This marriage anchored him firmly within Georgia’s professional elite.
By all appearances, David Winn was building a stable, upward life—education, profession, marriage, connections.
Then came 1861.
The Officer: Discipline, Duty, and Letters Home
Winn entered Confederate service with the Sumter Light Guards, part of the 4th Georgia Infantry. His rise was relatively quick—suggesting competence, education, and trust.
He served as an acting adjutant early on—a role requiring organization, literacy, and discipline. By 1862, he had been promoted through captain and major, and by Gettysburg, he was lieutenant colonel—effectively commanding the regiment in the field.
But what makes Winn stand out is not just rank. It’s what he wrote.
His surviving letters—now held in an Emory University collection—are mostly addressed to his wife. They are not grand speeches. They are personal, careful, and revealing.
At one point, trying to reassure her, he writes in essence:
- The cause is righteous
- Death is uncertain
- Who dies is in God’s hands
It’s not bravado. It’s controlled fatalism. He’s not pretending he’ll survive. He’s trying to make sense of the randomness.
Even more striking is what he says during the Pennsylvania campaign in June 1863:
[W]hile our own beautiful country is desolated terribly by vandals, some of whom are from this very country, I am happy to say that our men neither desire or are permitted to make robbers and outlaws of themselves. They neither burn, pillage, or in any way injure property or persons. Such conduct permitted to an Army of men burning to avenge most cruel and brutal wrongs would utterly demoralize and make it unmanageable. All hope, however, that this people will yet be made to feel some of the horrors of the war such as our own people have been subjected to. And truly this is an awfully frightened population.
That is a revealing line.
He’s not just arguing morality—he’s arguing control. Winn understood that an army that gives itself over to revenge becomes unmanageable. This is the voice of a disciplinarian officer, someone thinking about cohesion and command, not just glory.
So what did his men think of him?
We don’t have many direct quotes from enlisted men about Winn. But the circumstantial evidence is strong:
- He was trusted with administrative responsibility early
- He rose steadily through the ranks
- He commanded the regiment in a major battle
That doesn’t happen by accident. Officers who were incompetent or disliked didn’t last long in those roles.
Winn appears to have been respected—if not loved, then at least relied upon.
July 1, 1863: Death at Gettysburg
On the first day at Gettysburg, the 4th Georgia was part of George Doles’ brigade, advancing against Union XI Corps positions north of town.
Somewhere in that advance—during the violent collapse of Union lines—Winn was killed.
Accounts differ on the exact circumstances, but he died in the attack, leading his regiment forward.
And like thousands of others that day, he was buried quickly, near where he fell.
In his case, that meant the property of a local farmer named David Blocher.
The Blocher Farm—and the Gold Teeth
This is where Winn’s story becomes something else entirely.
After the war, Southern groups—especially ladies’ memorial associations—worked to recover Confederate dead and bring them home.
In 1871, an agent from Georgia came to retrieve Winn’s remains from the Blocher farm.
What happened next became a minor scandal.
According to multiple Georgia newspapers at the time:
- Blocher initially refused to allow removal without payment
- Eventually, the body was exhumed
- During or after the process, Winn’s gold dental plate was removed
The newspapers were furious. The language is harsh—accusing Blocher of effectively robbing the dead.
The story spread across Georgia papers quickly, especially because Winn had been a known figure in Americus.
But here’s the thing: outrage stories are not always the whole story.
Fifteen years later, in 1886, a letter from Rufus B. Weaver provides a quieter, more practical resolution.
Weaver notes that he paid $5 to recover Winn’s gold teeth, which were then sent south to Georgia.
No trial. No formal justice. Just a transaction.
That detail matters. It suggests:
- The situation may have been less a crime and more a dispute over compensation for the removal of the body
- Blocher may have kept the gold as payment he felt he was owed
- The “theft” narrative may have been shaped by Southern grief and anger
- Ultimately, the matter was settled not by law, but by money
Still, the damage to memory was done. Winn became one of those figures whose death story carried an aftertaste.
The Family Left Behind
Winn’s death did not just end a life—it disrupted a household.
He and Frances had two children:
- Cooper David Winn, who survived into adulthood
- A second son, often called James Dean Winn (or simply “Dean”), who died in 1863
So in the same year Frances lost her husband, she also lost a child.
After Winn’s death, she returned to her father’s home. This was not uncommon, but it tells you something important: she had support. The Dean family network likely kept her and her surviving son from the kind of poverty many Confederate widows faced.
Frances herself died relatively young, in 1874, in Macon.
Their surviving son, Cooper David Winn, lived on and carried the line forward. By the late 19th century, the Winn family was still present in Georgia, with descendants extending into the next generation.
But David Winn—the doctor, the officer—was gone before his son could really know him.
A Final Image
There is a strange postscript to Winn’s story.
Years after the war, a tale circulated that a portrait of him hanging in his Georgia home fell from the wall and was punctured through the head—at roughly the same time news arrived that he had been killed by a head wound at Gettysburg.
Is it true?
Probably not in the literal sense.
But it tells you how people remembered him.
Not just as a man who died—but as a man whose death echoed, whose story lingered, whose absence needed explanation.
Who Was David Winn?
He was:
- A South Carolina-born son of a rising Georgia family
- A formally trained physician
- A disciplined and thoughtful officer
- A husband writing carefully to calm his wife
- A man who believed the war was righteous—but also understood how easily armies fall apart
- A casualty of the first day at Gettysburg
- And, strangely, a man remembered for what happened to his teeth after he died
In the end, Winn’s story feels less like a legend and more like something messier.
A good life, interrupted.
A body, argued over.
A family, left to rebuild.
And a man who, even in death, refused to be neatly resolved.
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