Bones & Bodies Unaccounted For

cash

Brev. Brig. Gen'l
Joined
Feb 20, 2005
Location
Right here.
I was going through some of my files today and I found a story I had archived from the June, 1996 issue of Civil War News which reported on human bones found by a visitor to the Gettysburg National Battlefield Park on March 19 of that year. The story tells us it was most probably a confederate soldier.

The article quotes then-park historian Kathy Georg Harrison saying as many as 1200 to 1500 bodies of soldiers who fought in the Battle of Gettysburg are unaccounted for and therefore are still buried close to where they fell or near hospital sites somewhere in the 22 square miles [then] of the battlefield park.

So when you visit the park, remember the entire park is also a cemetery.
 
By the way, the soldier in question was never identified. His remains were buried in the National Cemetery in July, 1997. The funeral was attended by Daisy Anderson, 96, of Denver, Colorado and Alberta Martin, 90, of Elba, Alabama, who were both widows of Civil War soldiers. William Jasper Martin served in Company K, 4th Alabama, and Robert Ball Johnson served in the 125th USCT.
 
I suspect many, probably most, battlefields are that way. At an event honoring the New Hampshire dead at Saratoga National Battlefield on Memorial Day, you could look past the speakers and see lovely rolling meadows under which dozens of unidentified colonial militiamen (and probably some British soldiers) lay as they have for 240 years in unmarked graves.
 
I suspect many, probably most, battlefields are that way.

Not only battlefields. Even some of the most walked upon urban places. Case in point, Washington Square Park by the Philadelphia Old City. Since before the revolution was a potter's field used for slave burials. During the revolution it kept the bodies of both English and Continental soldiers. After the revolution it hosted the bodies of people who died in the different yellow fever epidemics. At 1815 it became a Park because the area became fashionable. They have been finding remains pretty much every time there is an improvement work in the area. They put a monument to the unknown Revolutionary War Soldier at some point in the 1950s...

Bet most people who are walking around, having lunch, and enjoying their time there, have absolutely no idea of what is going on below them...

washington-square-park.jpg
 
I'm currently at work sitting on top of what was once both a slave cemetery and native burials grounds before that.
The mounds were all leveled to put in the building and parking lot I am typing this from.
 
The New Haven CT green was the site of the original 1638 town's burying place. When the city decided they needed the space in the early 1800s they moved the gravestones, mostly to Grove Street, and left the bodies on the green, to be walked upon during concerts and fairs and rallies etc. During both the Revolutionary and Civil War soldiers marched on the green although they mostly trained elsewhere.
 
A year ago almost to the day I was visiting the site of the WW1 Gallipoli battlefield in Turkey. In 1985 heavy rains washed away topsoil and revealed a significant number of bones. It could not be determined whether they were Australian or Turkish (lack of DNA technology back then I guess). So they buried them together in this tomb ... friend and foe alike.

image.jpeg
 
When you really think about it, it shouldn't come as much of a surprise. Unfortunately when you think of the ghastly scenario of being "blow to bits" there is not much to bury. Thus there are probably lots of places like this. Thus battlefields are not only a great place to understand a battle, but also to reflect on those that gave their lives all over the field.
 
Thank you for sharing this, Cash. It reminded me of this post by Linda Wheeler in her Washington Post blog "House Divided." The soldier found was not at Gettysburg but at Antietam. Her account is not only fascinating but one of the most sensitively written articles I have ever seen on such a subject, a moving and worthy tribute to an unknown Civil War soldier and a reminder of our common humanity.

"Union Soldier's Remains Found at Antietam:"
http://voices.washingtonpost.com/house-divided/2008/12/a_union_soldier_found_buried_a.html
 
When you really think about it, it shouldn't come as much of a surprise. Unfortunately when you think of the ghastly scenario of being "blow to bits" there is not much to bury. Thus there are probably lots of places like this. Thus battlefields are not only a great place to understand a battle, but also to reflect on those that gave their lives all over the field.

It is hard to think of many scenarios during the Civil War where someone's body was so destroyed during combat that there would not be much to bury. The explosives at that time, including even the largest shells, would rarely have literally "blown" a body "to bits."

The reason the resting places of so many fallen soldiers are unknown is simply because there was no broadly organized recovery process or burial registration system. Many soldiers were buried by whoever controlled the field after the battle, and often by the local residents.
 
By the way, the soldier in question was never identified. His remains were buried in the National Cemetery in July, 1997. The funeral was attended by Daisy Anderson, 96, of Denver, Colorado and Alberta Martin, 90, of Elba, Alabama, who were both widows of Civil War soldiers. William Jasper Martin served in Company K, 4th Alabama, and Robert Ball Johnson served in the 125th USCT.
I was at the funeral. There were several hundred people attending. I'll have to hunt up my pics I took. IIRC they brought the widows in a horse drawn carriage . One of the bodies was found at the railroad cut. They buried him with other bones that were found on the battlefield.
 
I'm currently reading "Washington's Immortals" by Patrick O'Donnell. The book is about the combat troops from Maryland that served as the backbone of Washington's Contenental Army. O'Donnell got the idea for this work while on a walking tour of Brooklyn, NY nearly a decade ago. He found a rusted sign over a VFW hall which commemorated the sacrifice of 250 Marylanders. During the disastrous battle as the Continental Army was in full retreat, The Marylanders of Smallwoods battlaion counterattacked agains the British multiple times in a near suicidal effort to buy time for their broken comrades to retreat...

Their efforts succeeded but they were cut to shreds... Today, somewhere under the asphalt and concrete of Brooklyn New York, lays the mass grave of 240 Maryland Continental Army heroes...
 
Thanks so much for how many soldiers lie beneath the battlefield, Cash. It seemed so cold to try to count them after finding Dr. Weaver's work of the 1870's- he'd been able to recover nearly 3,000 men to send home for Southern burials. That left a thousand men who did not go home but gosh, husbands and sons and brothers and fathers still buried at Gettysburg? Couldn't fathom it. Still cannot, all the soldiers who never came home.
 
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