She lived in California until her death twenty years later, in relative comfort and peace. But there was one gruesome postscript to her loss at Harpers Ferry. In 1882, when Mary was visiting Chicago, an Indiana doctor offered to return the remains of her son Watson, who had been killed near the engine house and carried off for dissection and display at the medical school in Winchester. The doctor had served in Virginia during the war and recovered Watson’s remains before Union troops burned the medical school to the ground in 1862.
