Building A Bridge

PART FIVE: THEIR TIME

As I cleaned up the next morning, I noticed the fireplace stones were scorched, still warm from the fire. A Barnard memoir relates a common veteran experience, “The family were awakened in the dead of night by the Yankee yell, such as he and others were accustomed to give as they rode the charge, to hear him bound out of bed, yelling as he had in many a battle, only to be awakened by coming into contact with the furniture or the side of the house and then, soldier like, turn in again almost as though nothing had happened and go off to sleep.”

In an 1876 Decoration Day speech in West Randolph, Captain A. E. Leavenworth honored the likes of Edwina Paine: “We are reminded today of the heroic sacrifice of wife, mother, and sister as they bade us Godspeed with a full realization of the sacrifice they were laying upon their country’s altar. How those souls shone through those tears, we well remember… It is meet, then, that women would share so largely in the ceremonies of today. And, ladies, in the name of my comrades, and of the relatives of those whose remains we honor here today, I lay at your feet the homage of our heartfelt thanks.”

The war’s aftermath affected honored remains, as well. “The summer of 1866 was a time of searching through the country for Union dead, to place in the cemetery,” Jennie Friend of Petersburg wrote. “Five dollars was given for every collection of bones with a skull…”

Another described Burial Corps working the Petersburg area: “Some had been buried in trenches, some singly, some laid side by side and covered with a little earth, leaving feet and skull exposed; and many had not been buried at all. Throughout the woods were scattered these lonely graves. The method of finding them was simple. A hundred men were deployed in a line a yard apart, each examining half a yard of ground on both sides as they proceeded. Thus was swept a space five hundred yards in breadth. Trees were blazed or stakes set along the edge of this space to guide the company on its return. In this manner the entire battlefield had been or was to be searched. When a grave was found, the entire line was halted until the teams came up and the body was removed.”

In this manner the remains of Oscar Paine were placed in a pine box and loaded onto a horse-drawn wagon, then carried a mile west to today’s Poplar Grove National Cemetery. He is not among 2,139 identified burials there, but one of over 4,000 unknown Union soldiers gracing the green.

An early visitor described the site, “We rode out…to wander for a while among the graves. The place is laid out in sections, each section with its melancholy forest of white head-boards on which are painted the names and regiments of the dead men below… (in the unknown section) I wondered who the man was who lay beneath, where his home was, whether his mother was still alive, away, perhaps, in some far-off part of the world, wondering what had become of her boy… here he lay, alas! Sleeping his long sleep among the unknown dead.”

Fittingly, one must travel a half mile on a Stockbridge dirt road to visit Mount Pleasant Cemetery. Its steep slope is strewn as thick with Union dead as was the ground before Fredericksburg. Here lie, under lichen-encrusted, leaning, and occasionally broken headstones, more than fifty Grand Army of the Republic veterans. Tiny Stockbridge, today with a population of 600, had sent over 120 men to the Civil War. And here, within whispering distance, lie men who gathered foundation stones together, stood shoulder to shoulder in battle, and shared stone walls afterward.

Cenotaphs to Jeremiah Wilson, Killed in Action at Lee’s Mills, Alanson Packard, Killed in Action at Cold Harbor, and John Burnham, Killed in Action at the Wilderness, lie here. Neighbors Elisha Boutwell and Levi Goddard lie here. Amasa Adams, who attended Gettysburg’s celebrated 50th anniversary reunion in 1913, lies here, as do Rufus Mack and others of the fabled 16th Vermont.

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I sat to rest after cresting the slope. Today, just south of Petersburg, Virginia, there is not one monument or sign commemorating the First Battle of Weldon Railroad. Only by driving roads and studying landmarks and maps documenting the larger Second Battle of Weldon Railroad, can one locate where the 4th Vermont was overrun, and where Oscar Paine was killed. The site now lies within the grounds of Richard Bland College and is occupied by a new dormitory. A sign out front proclaims its name: The Patriot.

I looked over haphazard clusters of stones, up to hills that fade into hazy distance. No one knows, as they drive past my little house on Rt. 100, what memories it holds. No one will know the history of my fireplace rocks. And precious few remember those young Stockbridge warriors, chipped from these hills and then ground, worn, pulverized and finally abandoned in the glacial retreat of history.

It was their time.