NY Cypress Hills Cemetery, Where Union and Confederate, Black and White Rest Together in Brooklyn

This one is from my car. He is in the center, 2nd row. Right behind John Campbell:

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@2nd MN; 5th WI
 
I said prayers for the repose of their souls individually over, first, George's grave and then a few minutes later over William's. On this rainy day I could not linger but I took a picture of the trees to the left of the two men's graves. Their graves are not in this photo:

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Pat
Thank you so much for the photos and I owe you a return favor. George Litton was captured at Dinwiddie Court House on April, 1 and shipped to City Point, Va. From there he was sent to Hart's Island and passed on May 23, 1865.
Regards
David
PS I would send you a PM if I knew how to?
 
Pat
Thank you so much for the photos and I owe you a return favor. George Litton was captured at Dinwiddie Court House on April, 1 and shipped to City Point, Va. From there he was sent to Hart's Island and passed on May 23, 1865.
Regards
David
PS I would send you a PM if I knew how to?
My pleasure.
 
So I drove home from Brooklyn this afternoon and I resolved to try and get a shot of your ggg grandfather and it starts pouring rain. I was like, geez, I don't want to be walking around that big cemetery in the rain and me without a jacket. But I wanted to at least try to find the grave. So I park my car in the Union Burial Ground and saints be praised, there is your grandfather just two headstones away.

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Wow! Thanks so very much. That is very kind of you to make the trip and share your pictures. It is nice seeing the general surroundings also. As you say, it is interesting to have the North and South intermixed. Thanks for offering a prayer.

William Kragenbrack (Krajenbrink) was born in Holland in 1830. He was drafted November 16, 1864. On May 4, 1865 he was admitted to Grant Hospital and died May 17 or 19, leaving a wife and three kids ages 9 months to 9 years.

Pat, would you be OK with me downloading these photos to my computer?
 
Wow! Thanks so very much. That is very kind of you to make the trip and share your pictures. It is nice seeing the general surroundings also. As you say, it is interesting to have the North and South intermixed. Thanks for offering a prayer.

William Kragenbrack (Krajenbrink) was born in Holland in 1830. He was drafted November 16, 1864. On May 4, 1865 he was admitted to Grant Hospital and died May 17 or 19, leaving a wife and three kids ages 9 months to 9 years.

Pat, would you be OK with me downloading these photos to my computer?
Glad you like them. The pictures are yours, do with them as you will.
 
Here is how the article above describes the poor conditions at Hart Island that contributed to the deaths of hundreds of Confederates:

Hart Island (almost always incorrectly referred to as Hart's Island) is considerably larger than Davids Island. It, too, is located on Long Island Sound, slightly south of Davids Island, about twenty miles from the southern tip of Manhattan. It was acquired by the DeLancey family from the British Crown in 1774 and was farmed by a number of families until shortly before the Civil War. The owner at that time leased Hart Island to New York State for use as a military rendezvous, depot and training camp. The state turned it over to the Federal government in late 1861. In the summer of 1863 half of the island was designated as a prisoner of war camp and became, in a short time, one of the prison camps with the highest mortality percentage rates of all northern camps. The original camp was a stockade enclosing four acres and both prisoners and guards were housed in tents. Through the use of many of the arriving prisoners as laborers, wooden barracks were erected by March, 1864, not soon enough, however, for the prisoners to avoid the cold winter winds and storms that swept across the Sound. During the month of April, 1865, more than 3,400 prisoners were crammed into barracks, also called wards, in the camp. Each ward contained a hundred men. There were three rows of bunks and two men to a bunk. Since there were only twenty wards, the crowding must have been even worse than officially admitted. From April to July, 1865, 7% of the total prisoner population died. United States Army Medical Inspector George Lyman reported that "the largest portion of deaths occurred from chronic diarrhea brought with them [by the prisoners], and pneumonia, which began to appear a few days after their arrival....The men being poorly clad, the weather wet and cold, and the barracks provided with no other bedding than such as the prisoners brought with them, the pneumonia cases developed rapidly... increased probably, to some extent by the crowded and unventilated condition of the barracks." A steamboat the "John Romer", manned by the U. S. Army, made regular trips between Manhattan and Hart Island bringing prisoners to the island. Nothing has been found to show how the bodies of those who died there were moved to Long Island, but it is probable that this same steamer performed this task. The dead would be either landed at one of the piers that then stood in Flushing Bay or, more probably, brought back down the East River to the Brooklyn terminus of the Catherine Street ferry for transport to Cypress Hills.
 
Thank you Pat for taking the time to pray and pay your respects to all those buried there and especially my GGGrandfather. It is a beautiful oasis in an urban environment. Thank you also for the photo of his grave.
Regards
David
 
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