Biography
David Fry was an East Tennessee Unionist. David Fry led the party that burned the Lick Creek railroad bridge in the November 1861 uprising and then took to the mountains to organize loyalists for the Union army. Captured by the Confederacy in 1862, he was held in a series of Confederate prisons under threat of execution before escaping. He survived the war. (Recorded as Captain David Fry)
Donahue Bible’s study of artifacts preserved by David Fry’s descendants gives Fry’s birth date as December 4, 1825. It confirms that he escaped the Atlanta Confederate prison on the night of October 14, 1862, before a planned execution; this was an escape from that captivity, not his final wartime release. The article separately says he was in and out of Confederate prisons during the war and describes his March 21, 1865 honorable discharge as that of a paroled prisoner. The discharge order is not used as a physical prison-release date. His identified historical portrait shows Fry in a colonel’s uniform beside his wife Catherine; the original photograph’s caption and family provenance are reproduced in the article.
Donahue Bible, Tennessee Ancestors, December 2005, printed pages 155–159.
