Biography
Mary Ragan Macgill was the wife of Hagerstown physician and political prisoner Dr. Charles Macgill. Marshall reports that federal soldiers guarded the Macgill home, controlled entry and exit and, after the Gettysburg campaign in 1863, held Mrs. Macgill and her daughters prisoners there for five weeks while seeking her husband. An order to send her South was not carried out because a federal physician certified that she was too ill to move. Her daughters Mrs. Robert Swan and Alice were subsequently transported under guard through Baltimore and Winchester. Her identity as Mary Ragan, wife of Charles Macgill, is confirmed by Smithsonian portrait records. Exact custody dates are unknown. Sources: John A. Marshall, American Bastile (1869), printed pages 372–373, https://archive.org/details/americanbastile00marsgoog; Smithsonian American Art Museum inventory, The Ragan Sisters, https://www.si.edu/object/ragan-sisters-painting%3Asiris_ari_251638; Texas State Historical Association, Rosenberg, Mollie Ragan Macgill, https://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/entries/rosenberg-mollie-ragan-macgill.
