- Joined
- Feb 23, 2013
- Location
- East Texas
The large and gloomy city cemetery in the capital city of Pennsylvania Harrisburg dates from the 1840's. It was situated on a bluff overlooking the city and is a representative City of the Dead typical of many dating from the middle of the Nineteenth Century in America. Unfortunately it is now located in a somewhat "bad" neighborhood but there is little evidence of that within its chain-link walls.
As denoted on the Civil War Trails marker at the entrance, among the notables buried here are one-time Governor of the then-brand-new State of California, noted Abolitionist, and Union Major General John W. Geary and Pennsylvania politician, Lincoln's first Secretary of War and subsequent Ambassador to Tsarist Russia Simon Cameron. Unfortunately we failed to find the section containing Cameron's grave due to trees down on the pathways.
Governor Maj. Gen. John W. Geary's grave marked by his statue was easier to locate near the bluff. Among other accomplishments Geary commanded a division of the Union Twelfth Corps at Gettysburg and in Grant's Chattanooga Campaign.
An interesting section was that of graves that had been located from a ca. 1791 Presbyterian "Burying Ground" to the newer cemetery which eventually engulfed it.
Note the long rows of Presbyterian graves, several of which were much more legible than other newer stones now unreadable from the effects of acid rain.
A section of Civil War-era graves included among the expected Federals those of several Confederates who had died in local hospitals of wounds following the nearby Battle of Gettysburg.
This glaringly white one near the cemetery entrance and the still-occupied caretaker's cottage below had only very recently been cleaned!