|
Welcome
Taphophilia (dot) Com...
A repository of morbid curiosities:
Thanatology and Taphophile Issues, Cemetery,
Funeral Industry and Death Related News.
What's New at Arcadia
Historic Burial Grounds of the New Hampshire Seacoast By Glenn A. Knoblock
Arcadia Publishing has releases a new title in the Images of America series, the historic account of the cemeteries along the New Hampshire Seacoast. This collection is a must for anyone interested in local history, genealogy, or colonial-era art. Please visit Arcadia Publishing to purchase your copy of Historic Burial Grounds of the New Hampshire Seacoast and browse other cemetery books!
Green-Wood Cemetery By Alexandra Mosca
Arcadia Publishing announces the release of the historic account of one of New York's most famous cemeteries. Aracdia Publishing's Images of America series has an extensive catalog of many cemetery publications! Please visit Arcadia Publishing to purchase your copy of Green-Wood Cemetery.
Announcements
Quoting Death in Early Modern England: The Poetics of Epitaphs Beyond the Tomb By Scott L. Newstok
An innovative study of the Renaissance practice of making epitaphic gestures within other English genres. A poetics of quotation uncovers the ways in which writers including Shakespeare, Marlowe, Holinshed, Sidney, Jonson, Donne, and Elizabeth I have recited these texts within new contexts. Visit Palgrave Macmillan and purchase your copy today!
Living by the Dead By Ellen Ashdown with illustrations by Mary Liz Moody.
A memoir about living beside a cemetery--and about the members of my family who came to rest at Roselawn Cemetery in Tallahassee, Florida. Please visit Kitsune Books for more information.
Graveyards of Chicago: The People, History, Art, and Lore of Cook County Cemeteries By Matt Hucke And Ursula Bielski.
Discover a Chicago That Exists Just Beneath the Surface - About Six Feet Under! Take a tour of Chicago's permanent residents! Please visit the Lake Claremont Press website to purchase your copy of Graveyards of Chicago today!
Epitaphs: The Magazine for Cemetery Lovers By Cemetery Lovers
For information regarding subscriptions, single issues, submission guidelines, deadlines, classifieds or advertising for future issues, please visit The Cemetery Club.
Guardians of the Soul: Angels and Innocents, Mourners and Saints with photography by John Bower and foreword by Claude Cookman
Indiana's remarkable cemetery sculpture is now available. Please visit Studio Indiana for more information.
West Springfield Massachusetts: Stories Carved in Stone by Rusty Clark
Features information on early New England gravestone carvers with more than two hundred photos and illustrations. Please visit the Dog Pond Press website.
|
|
Grave Claims: Historians in Thomasville believe that Confederate, Union soldiers |
|
|
|
|
Saturday, 02 October 2004 |
Grave Claims: Historians in Thomasville believe that Confederate, Union soldiers' burial situation is unique
By Laura Giovanelli
JOURNAL REPORTER
THOMASVILLE--This is a place you have to look for.
It's not Gettysburg, Antietam or even Durham's Bennett Place, historic sites ringed by minivans and SUVs, complete with costumed re-enactors and stores peddling postcards, T-shirts and ghost tours.
But the little grass plot and low stone markers in the middle of Thomasville's city cemetery has a big claim: Local historians believe that it's the only place in the country where Confederate and Union soldiers were buried side by side in orderly graves.
Some national Civil War scholars say that it is too difficult to prove that the plot is unique. But they acknowledge that it is unusual to have a place where enemies are buried next to each other.
It's one reason why Chris Watford, a high-school history teacher and local historian, has nominated Thomasville and its cemetery to be included on the state's Civil War Trail system. The historic routes wind through Virginia, Maryland and North Carolina and attract tourists interested more in history than amusement parks or beaches.
It's also one of the last physical remains of Thomasville's role in the war.
In 1865, Thomasville was 13 years old, born from a railroad depot. The railroad brought stores and factories and churches along new city streets. It brought death and sickness, too, and Confederate surgeon Simon Baruch was ordered to Thomasville that year to open hospitals to treat the wounded from the retreating Southern army and Union soldiers from faraway battlefields.
Two churches and a tobacco warehouse became hospitals, Watford says. In the spring of 1865, several hundred men wounded in the battles of Averasboro and Bentonville in Eastern North Carolina would pass through them. In the next months, about 30 died and were buried in the young city's cemetery.
The war ended. The hospitals closed.
In 1908, a minister from Macon, Ga., appealed to Southern veterans for money to mark the graves.
"Some of the sick and wounded soldiers were carried to Thomasville, N.C., and the Baptist church building was turned into a hospital, where faithful and patriotic women ministered to them in their sufferings, wiped the death damp from their brows, and tenderly laid their bodies to rest in the little cemetery hard by," the Rev. William Rich wrote in the October 1908 issue of Confederate Veteran.
Rich didn't note anything remarkable about the list of dead buried in Thomasville that followed: B.H. Badge, of Co. D, 2nd North Carolina Regiment, near D.D. Starmin, "a young Federal prisoner," next to a C. Lane, of the 10th Illinois Regiment.
Most died in the hospital. A few may have died of smallpox, and one North Carolina corporal buried there was killed in action along the Potomac in 1864.
There are at least two Union soldiers buried in the plot. Several other names on Rich's list do not indicate the dead soldier's home state.
But these arrangements, Tarheels laid next to Yankees in marked graves, would have been highly unusual during what some still call the War Between the States.
At least 10 Confederates were accidentally mixed in with Union dead buried in the National Cemetery at Gettysburg, according to Gettysburg College's Civil War Institute.
Whether the Thomasville plot was a gesture of reconciliation or merely a convenient burial site near the hospitals is unanswered. "That's the mystery to me as a researcher," Watford said.
Leah Wood Jewett, the director of the United States Civil War Center at Louisiana State University, said that whatever the reason, the important thing is that Thomasville acknowledges the plot now. "That's almost as important as if they were buried that way in the first place," she said.
Markers were eventually placed over some of the graves, each engraved with the soldier's name, but not his affiliation, rank or even his state - also unusual, Watford said, given that soldiers in Gettysburg were separated by state.
In 1995, the local United Daughters of the Confederacy placed a larger monument not far away, "dedicated to the men of the blue and the gray" to honor both armies.
A former Marine, Paul Mitchell, likes to see it that way when he visits. Now a lawyer, Thomasville's solicitor, an amateur historian and a member of the Davidson County Civil War Round Table, Mitchell is also an impromptu tour guide of the site.
To him, country comes first, he said, as he stood among the dark-gray markers last week. Weed trimmers whined behind him, tidying up more modern graves: headstones of Thomasville's dead, put there by relatives; graves with less mystery.
Mitchell said that he also likes to think that early Thomasville residents had the decency to nurse both their enemies and their own soldiers back to health, and then had the heart to treat them equally in death, too. "You can stand (here) and think, 'There's a boy from Michigan, and his parents never knew what happened to him,'" Mitchell said.
http://www.journalnow.com/servlet/Satellite?pagename=WSJ/MGArticle/WSJ_BasicArticle&c=MGArticle&cid=1031778006084 |
|
