Colonel George Penny Webster, born near Middletown, Ohio, on December 24, 1824, was an attorney who volunteered for the Mexican War and was wounded in the shoulder at the Battle of Monterey in September 1846. When the Civil War began, he left his law practice to join the Union army, serving first as major of the 25th Ohio Volunteer Infantry, which fought in western Virginia and central Virginia in late 1861 and early 1862 and distinguished itself against Major General Thomas J. "Stonewall" Jackson at McDowell on May 8, 1862. In late summer 1862 Webster was promoted to colonel, transferred to the western theater, and formed the 98th Ohio Infantry, organized at Steubenville, Ohio, and mustered in for three years' service on August 20, 1862, with recruits from eastern Ohio. He was soon given command of the 34th Brigade of the Army of the Ohio's Tenth Division, which included the 98th Ohio, 80th Indiana, 50th Ohio, 121st Ohio, and Samuel J. Harris' 19th Indiana Battery. Within two months he led the brigade into the Battle of Perryville with 3,171 men. Because the rest of the Tenth Division, including commander James S. Jackson, was deployed just over a half mile north, Webster effectively held an independent command made up of men who had never seen combat, many carrying old and unreliable Prussian muskets. Jackson was soon killed, and the division's other brigadier general, William R. Terrill, was killed soon after, further isolating Webster's Brigade. Anchored around the 19th Indiana Battery on the highest ground on the battlefield, just over 100 yards northeast of here, the brigade faced the Confederate advance after Lovell Rousseau's 3rd Division gave way under tremendous pressure. After a gallant stand, Benjamin Cheatham's bloodied veteran Confederate troops, supported by the fresh Confederate brigade commanded by St. John Liddell, pushed over the ridge and drove the panicked survivors of Webster's Brigade toward this area. While rallying his men, Webster was shot in the hip and fell from his horse. He was taken to a field hospital and soon died of his wound. His death, together with those of Jackson and Terrill, meant the complete decapitation of the Tenth Division; at no other time in the Civil War were a division commander and all of its brigade commanders killed in a single action. Webster's 34th Brigade suffered 89 killed, 417 wounded, and 139 missing or captured, for a total of 645 casualties, just over 20 percent. Twenty years later, some of the soldiers who had fought with him erected a monument at the Steubenville, Ohio, cemetery where he was buried.