"Once lost, now found, never forgotten..." - TTG

Republished from 2016

A Memorial Day tradition at Fredericksburg National Cemetery continues

BY JOSEF W. ROKUS/FOR THE FREE LANCE–STAR

In 1993, Montfort Academy fifth-grader Kent Ingalls was preparing for the annual placement of flags on graves at Fredericksburg National Cemetery. Kent’s teacher told the class about a longtime cemetery mystery: flowers that appear every year at the gravestone of a Union soldier from Massachusetts.

Those flowers were no mystery to Kent, however. He told his classmates that after the Civil War, the soldier’s family had sent $100 to his great-great-great-grandfather, cemetery superintendent Andrew Birdsall, to place flowers at Jerome Peirce’s grave every Memorial Day, and his descendants had carried on the tradition for well over a century.

Continue reading the full article.

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This Connecticut Yankee has grown to love my new home in the Fredericksburg, Virginia area. History hangs thick in the air and my local paper revels in retelling it. After a long drive home from Saratoga, New York, it was a joy to read this article in my morning paper. But this article went beyond retelling a story that continues to this day. It offered a lesson in what it means to keep one’s word and faithfully discharge a duty. Major Birdsall not only learned this lesson well, but he passed it along to future generations of the Birdsall family. This is the stuff of a healthy and successful society. I fear it is a lesson only rarely taught today.

There is another tradition involving the Fredericksburg National Cemetery. This Saturday night, the local Boys and Girl Scouts will light 15,300 candles in the cemetery - one for each soldier buried there. This luminaria will be accompanied by a bugler playing Taps every thirty minutes and park staff posted throughout the cemetery telling the stories of the soldiers buried there. It is a moving sight among my brethren lying in the hallowed ground above Marye’s Heights.

TTG

2018 Update:

Last night’s luminaria commemoration at the Fredericksburg National Cemetery took place, but was cut short due to the storms passing through our area. We lost power, but only for four hours or so. I woke up this morning to the sound of chainsaws in the neighborhood. A similar luminaria commemoration is scheduled at the Fredericksburg Confederate Cemetery tonight. I wish them better weather.  

Joe Rokus, the author of that 2016 article, designed a project to transcribe hundreds of letters held by the National Park Service. Coordinating the efforts of volunteers, the program successfully transcribed over 150 letters resulting in digitizing a part of history that can be accessed by future historians. In his honor, this is called the Sergeant Jerome Pierce Transcription Project. Once lost, now found, never forgotten.

TTG

Comments

[YT]

TTG,

Col., here I was thinking only REMFs (& geeks like yours truly) love these sugared treats...

[Mark Gaughan]

My fellow Americans, ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country.
John F. Kennedy

[The Twisted Genius]

Mark,

That quote was emblazoned in six inch high letters on the wall in the main lobby of my grammar school in Prospect, Connecticut. It's meaning was also impressed on our young minds by our teachers. This is not surprising since our town, founded by Separatist Puritains, still valued this very Puritanical idea of community first.

[turcopolier]

TTG - When my wife and I owned a farm in the Shenandoah Valley, we were invited one memorial day to such a ceremony at Strasburg, Virginia. It was held in the HS football stadium. This little town and the surrounding countryside lost 120 men killed in the WBS. The whole town seemed to have assembled. The evening of memorial remembrance ended with the stadium in darkness while the crowd stood. One at a time high school girls walked onto the illuminated field each in a white gown and carrying camellias and wearing a sash that named one by one the states for which their people had fought. Maryland was included. We were honored to have been invited.

[The Twisted Genius]

These ceremonies were a fairly big deal in Prospect, Connecticut when I was young. Surprising since we were so far from any of the fighting. Prospect sent 75 volunteers to the Civil War, over half the voting population at the time. Our town soldiers monument is a Union Civil War soldier in short jacket and trousers tucked into his socks. As young students we made shakos out of construction paper. Dressed in our finest clothes, we would march around the monument, wearing our shakos, holding our US flags and singing our patriotic songs. Most of our parents and town dignitaries watched.

[catherine]

None of my family were professional soldiers but served in every war from
the Revolution up to the Gulf war and I have great respect for our soldiers...makes me a little teary eyed and heart fluttery on Memorial Day thinking about the whole sweep of soldiers in our history.
One of our family's most treasured items is a letter my great grandmother wrote to her two sons in 1812 instructing them to beware the hardening of the heart incidental to camp life and to do their duty for the country and uphold the honor of the family. Its now in the North Carolina Museum of History.
I always think of this when I see cemeteries with the flags planted :
''Who is the happy Warrior? Who is he
That every man in arms should wish to be?
Who, doomed to go in company with Pain,
And Fear, and Bloodshed, miserable train!
Turns his necessity to glorious gain;
But who, if he be called upon to face
Some awful moment to which Heaven has joined
Great issues, good or bad for human kind,
Is happy as a Lover; and attired
With sudden brightness, like a Man inspired;
And, through the heat of conflict, keeps the law
In calmness made, and sees what he foresaw;
Or if an unexpected call succeed,
Come when it will, is equal to the need:

Conspicuous object in a Nation's eye,
Or left unthought-of in obscurity,—
Who, with a toward or untoward lot,
Or if he must fall, to sleep without his fame,
And leave a dead unprofitable name—

Finds comfort in himself and in his cause;
And, while the mortal mist is gathering, draws
His breath in confidence of Heaven's applause:
This is the happy Warrior; this is he
That every man in arms should wish to be.''

[optimax]

I like Ben and Jerry's DOUBLE-CHOCOLATE BYPASS.