Forgotten Graves

By Guy Lounsbury

I’ve recently read George Warner’s journals, at least the parts www.bernehistory.org has posted thus far.  George, in case you don’t know, was a young man living in Berne during the 1800’s.  I’m quite certain George wouldn’t have considered his few lines of day to day events as exemplary, but I find them enthralling.  To read what life was like for someone 140 years ago, someone that looked out over the same lands that we today see is an amazing thing.  George’s journal has added depth to my appreciation of this area and the people that lived here.  He left a legacy that enriches everyone who reads it.

War was raging as George came of age.  Though neither he nor few others realized it at the time, Americans were in the middle of a war that saw wholesale slaughter on a scale never before or since experienced by this country.  George was obviously interested in the war, what young man wouldn’t be.  He wrote of different battles and of the hill town men joining up and heading off to “the seat of war” as he called it.  Although he doesn’t say as much, the thought must have been much in his mind to do the same. 

On October 13, 1862, a mere three line entry to his journal records his decision.  On that day he hitched up the wagon, left his home in Berne, traveled to Knox, and there, with seven other men, enlisted for nine months service in the army.  He makes it seem so trivial, something that was hardly worth recording and yet it was such a momentous decision.  Hardly yet become men, these boys from small little known towns decided to play their part in the greatest drama occurring in the world.  How frightening and yet exhilarating it must have been for them.

I have thought about his actions that day.  Young men are what they’ve always been.  It doesn’t take a great deal of imagination to consider the conversations that took place on the road to Knox that day.  I’m sure they spoke of whipping the rebels and returning home heroes to young ladies that would gaze with admiring eyes on their glorious countenances and chests full of metals.  Unfortunately war never lives up to a young man’s expectations of glory.  “War is all hell.”  General William Tecumseh Sherman once said.  The veracity of that statement has sadly been proved a million times since.

I have been doing some research into the part played by our local men since I read George’s journal.  I have found that over 100 hill town men volunteered for duty during those dark days in our country’s history.  Today that would be considered a great many; back then it was almost an entire generation.  The people of the hill towns sacrificed greatly during that war.   They did their part; they did their duty.  A great many died preserving our country.

Their ages varied greatly.  Most joined in their late teens and early twenties.  But some men were well into their 40’s when they enlisted, and two I have come across thus far joined the fight at 15.  One of these, Peter Warner, George’s younger brother, joined the 7^th NY Heavy Artillery after George’s death.  How painful that must have been to parents who had already lost one son to the war.  Peter was captured at the siege of Petersburg, Va. on June 16, 1863 and subsequently sent to Andersonville Prison Camp where he died of starvation.  Andersonville was the most notorious of all prison camps in the Civil War for its hellish conditions.  I cannot for even a moment imagine the thoughts that must have gone through Peter’s young mind as he was brought into that awful place.  He wasn’t the only hill town man sent there.

George’s regiment, the 177^th NY Volunteers, was assigned to Louisiana, to help break the last Confederate hold on the Mississippi between Vicksburg and Port Hudson.  It was a swampy area, not one that boys from the northeast were well suited for.  Once there, disease swept through the camps, striking down far more men's lives than bullets claimed.  Death became so commonplace that it merited little more than a brief mention in George’s journal.  Disease eventually claimed George’s own life, as well as the friends he wrote about.  In fact, the only one I have been able to find from the group that left the hill towns with the 177^th and came back alive was my own great great grandfather, David Gathen.  There was a cost though; he came back blind, a Minie ball taking out both his eyes.  George was with him that night; he recorded the event in his journal.  It was a strange thing to read.

Even in death, most of these boys were brought home.  Some like George came back too sick to further serve and died shortly thereafter.  Most died far away in lands they would never have likely seen nor heard of were it not for the war.  They died with their comrades for comfort and little else.  Medicine, when it existed at all, was primitive and scarce.  “Died of disease contracted while in service.”  I see that over and over again on their muster papers.  Young men, who loved life as much as any young man does today, died before they ever got a chance to really live.  Their bodies were returned to the hill towns, to the land that had nurtured them, to be buried amongst their families and friends.

They are still here, these young men, at least I believe them to be in some mystical way.  For if lives, filled with such vitality can be completely erased then what is there left to believe in?  Rather, I prefer to think of them as some faint echo, some fading but never completely gone, memory that the land itself holds on to.  Though their bones now lay for the most part in unkempt, forgotten graves, and their lives reduced to unreadable inscriptions on time-worn stones, their spirits are certainly still with us.  

George, Alonzo, Joel, Jesse along with all the others that I am coming to know, walked these same hills as we do, they worked the land, they courted young ladies, they had dreams left unfulfilled and they left lives unlived.  Now George lays in Beaverdam Cemetery, a small leaning white stone marks his grave, Alonzo is buried somewhere in Gallupville, Joel in back of the ruins of West Mountain Methodist Church and Jesse on the  Berne flats.  Many more, with still familiar family names, are scattered in all the cemeteries around us.  The young men and the old veterans now lay six feet down, resting in the ground that had sustained them in life.

No one now knows what they looked like; their faces, voices and thoughts have left living memory long ago.  But on a cool fall day, in the gentle breeze that always seems to blow on that isolated stretch of road between Berne and Knox, just maybe, ever so faintly, remain the echoes of laughter and the false bravado of young men who, unknowingly, with so little time on this earth left to them, head toward their forgotten graves.