Subject:  "Who was the last person who knew them or cared?" |
Author:
Leon Harrison
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Date Posted: 23:22:16 05/20/09 Wed
Leon Harrison
West Carrollton, Ohio
Wednesday, May 20, 2009
To: The Editor
Subject: Civil War graves at Dayton’s Old Green Castle Cemetery
“Who was the last person who knew them or cared?”
I forget exactly when I first noticed the Old Green Castle Cemetery and that black cannon, sitting back about a hundred feet from the South Broadway Street fence, located on the West Side of Dayton, Ohio. I am a Union infantry reenactor. Although curious about such monument guns, I had kept driving by without stopping to look at it, time after time, until this afternoon. Today, was a beautiful sunny spring day and I had decided to drive back home that way. After parking my car upon that faint grassy lane, I got out with my camera and walked through the grass toward the cannon and the flag pole that were located at the center of a small section that included a few scattered Civil War gravestones. This black iron cannon had once been a field gun on a wheeled wooden carriage, pulled by a team of horses with a [powder and shot] caisson behind it. Now it sits with the muzzle elevated on a concrete stand. Most of those Union Civil War gravestones are too eroded and worn for me to read, save for a later newer civilian replacement and a few that remained with sharper engravings of names, dates and Union units that had once belonged to the bodies that had been buried there beneath the grass so long ago.
Later, after getting back home with my digital images, that I have downloaded into this computer, I started scanning the Internet to get what I could get concerning learning a little about this old abandoned neglected cemetery. The City of Dayton is broke and cannot afford to take care of this private cemetery. Nor do I care enough about it, or those old Civil War veterans, to donate my money or my time or to mow the grass over their graves. I think about and imagine gathering there with my fellow and female reenactors, to run up our national flag, make some short speeches, and do a present-arms and fire-by-volley rifle salute to them while a bugler plays taps.
Now, let us imagine and fantasize and wonder: Who was the last person who knew and cared about one of those old Civil War soldiers who had been buried there? A child? A grandchild? When had the last of them visited or gathered as if they and their Memorial Day mattered? When was the last time that a band had played and they had made speeches and prayed? When was the last time that they had played taps, saluted and cried under their flag and that old flag pole, while leaning on their canes, sitting in their wheelchairs, and wearing their blue caps, hats and uniforms with their medals? Had they been deafened or otherwise injured or wounded by gunfire? Had that cannon been fired in anger at their enemies? Where had they been and what had they done? What had they seen? What had their lives been like, both before and after the Civil War, with their wives, their children and their fellow veterans? Had they lived in this very [but newer, nicer, neater and safer] neighborhood and commemorated their Memorial Days here?
The descendants of the slaves, whom they had liberated, now live in the neighborhood and inside the decaying dwellings nearby. Alas, all of them have long been forgotten and are now only known and remembered by God, their lives and histories being interesting mysteries…as will be ours one day.
Leon Harrison
West Carrollton, Ohio
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