Soldiers' graves lacked proper headstones. These men took up their cause.

Washington Post

a day ago

The roots of John Knox's despondence are lost to history. But his suicide made the newspaper: In 1895, he tied one end of a rope around his neck and the other around a stone block. Then he threw himself into Baltimore's harbor.
A document in Knox's pocket identified him as an army pensioner but included no next of kin, according to a brief account in the Baltimore Sun. He was sent to a pauper's grave and forgotten for more than 120 years.
Then two workers at the city's Green Mount Cemetery came across his story in 2022 and applied for a grave marker through a little-known law passed in 1879. It requires the federal government to ship a headstone anywhere in the world for anyone who served in the U.S. military — not just those who died in combat or are buried in military cemeteries.
The result is a granite plaque on a leafy hillside of the historic graveyard. It reads: 'Sgt. John W. Knox, Medal of Honor.'
It's one of more than 167 such markers, tombstones and medallions that the cemetery workers Shawn Ward and Lyle Garitty have installed in the graveyard to memorialize forgotten men and women who did their duty in conflicts as far back as the Revolutionary War.
They are among the most active of what the Department of Veterans Affairs says is a growing number of history buffs, Boy Scout troops and others who have taken up the cause of long-dead warriors. Pupils at a high school in Ohio installed more than 70 headstones in historic cemeteries near their school. An Orlando resident secured 61 headstones for veterans of the Spanish-American War and other conflicts at Mount Peace Cemetery in St. Cloud, Florida.
And in Maryland, community members procured 11 headstones to honor members of the United States Colored Troops who fought in the Civil War and are buried in the Ellsworth Cemetery in Westminster, Maryland.
Last year, VA's National Cemetery Administration shipped 112,459 headstones, plaques and other 'memorial products' to private graveyards, said Eric Powell, director of Memorial Products Service for the NCA. The government doesn't keep track of how many are for historic graves, but most are for recent deaths.
The cost to taxpayers for the markers at private graveyards, and for a slightly larger number at national cemeteries, is about $80 million a year.
Many of the memorial products center on Black graveyards. The government granted White veterans the right to a free headstone shortly after the Civil War, but the privilege wasn't extended to Black soldiers until President Harry S. Truman desegregated the armed forces in 1948.
That was too late for many of the veterans buried at Lebanon Cemetery, a Black graveyard opened in 1872 in York, Pennsylvania. A local group, the Friends of Lebanon Cemetery, has installed 17 government-issued headstones on graves that never had one or were marked with wooden ones that had rotted away, said Samantha Dorm, a volunteer with the group.
Recordkeeping for African American soldiers was 'an afterthought' for much of history, she says. That made it difficult to procure the necessary documentation to satisfy VA.
It wasn't until 1977 that the government declared women who served in units such as the Women Airforce Service Pilots, or WASPs in World War II, to be veterans.
To get a grave marker, an applicant must provide documentation of a veteran's honorable discharge of service in the federal armed services and certify that his or her grave is currently unmarked or marked with a badly deteriorated headstone. In some cases, VA will even provide a plaque or marker — although not a tombstone — if it can be proved that the body has gone missing. That's how Ward and Garitty were able to procure a marker for Knox, whom they believe is buried under a road.
The stones come in granite or marble and weigh more than 200 pounds. They are shipped free, but applicants must pay for the installation if it's in a private cemetery.
Paul LaRue found a ready supply of volunteers while he was a social studies teacher at Washington High School in the rural hamlet of Washington Court House, Ohio. He was leading a field trip to a cemetery when a student asked about the poor condition of headstones over some soldiers' graves.
After a bit of research, he learned about VA's headstone program and launched a project to have students research the buried veterans, order and then install markers. They put up about 70 of them between 2002 and 2012 in six graveyards around southern Ohio.
'It was really a great way to connect the students to the community and their history,' said LaRue, who retired from teaching and is now president of the Ohio State Board of Education.
In the six years they've been at it, Baltimore's Ward and Garitty have become a two-man honor guard, putting up markers and helping like-minded enthusiasts from Pennsylvania to Western Maryland.
Ward and Garitty, veterans themselves, have scoured military archives, city death records and handwritten ledgers in the cemetery's dusty office. They've found soldiers, sailors and aviators whose graves were never marked or whose tombstones were lost or damaged.
Their freshly carved, white stone slabs and polished bronze markers stand out amid the weathered monuments of Green Mount. They form a sort of granite Facebook of American history.
There's one for Pvt. David Mumma, who served in a battalion of ethnic Germans from Maryland and Pennsylvania who fought under George Washington at the Battle of Trenton. Another marks the grave of Aquila Randall, a Maryland militiaman killed in the 1814 British invasion of Baltimore that inspired the national anthem. Fighter pilot Richard Seth, a standout lacrosse player at the U.S. Naval Academy, was lost at sea during the Korean War.
'Being a veteran, I wanted to do what I could to be sure all veterans get the recognition they deserve,' said Garitty, an administrator and historian at Green Mount.
He and Ward, the cemetery's superintendent, formed a charity to raise funds for the work. They get donations from veteran's groups and individuals, and use VA's headstone and marker program.
'The research takes a lot of time,' Ward said.
Both men are steeped in military service. Garitty's great-grandfather fought in the Civil War and his father served in World War II, the Korean and Vietnam wars. Garitty did two tours with the U.S. Air Force, first as a mechanic and then in logistics. He left as a sergeant.
Ward has 21 years of active and reserve service with the Seabees, the Navy's construction arm.
Green Mount is a tourist attraction of grand monuments in a distressed neighborhood of Baltimore, ringed by a gothic stone fence. It was established in 1838. Sixteen generals and one admiral from the Civil War are buried there.
Some veterans were buried at Green Mount without a headstone, likely because the family couldn't afford one, Garitty said. Then there are the relocations: Moving the dead was common in past centuries as cities grew and burial practices shifted from small graveyards behind homes or churches toward centralized cemeteries. They often arrived at Green Mount without headstones and were reburied in unmarked, brick-lined mass vaults.
Ward and Garitty learn about veterans in their care in several ways. Sometimes families approach them looking for the grave of an ancestor. Other names come up as Garitty digitizes Green Mount's copious burial records, neatly stashed in chest-high filing cabinets or a walk-in bank vault in the cemetery office. He also checks Pentagon databases of service.
If he finds a record of a veteran in an unmarked grave he files a request online to get a marker.
He and Ward found out about Knox from a group trying to track down Medal of Honor recipients thought to be buried in the area.
Military records showed that Knox was with the 5th U.S. Infantry in 1874, which had been ordered to force Native Americans onto reservations in what came to be known as the Red River War. On Sept. 9, their wagon train was attacked by hundreds of Comanche and Kiowa fighters at Upper Washita River in Texas. The 95 infantry soldiers circled their wagons and managed to hold out for five days until a calvary unit rescued them. Knox was cited for gallantry.
An 1895 newspaper account of Knox's death said he died with a certificate in his pocket for a $6-a-month pension for his 20 years of service. He had retired from the Army two years earlier and was living in a soldier's home in Washington.
No one came forward to claim his body, so he was sent to a potter's field in West Baltimore.
But he didn't stay there. City records show he hopscotched from graveyard to graveyard as the city expanded in the 19th and 20th centuries, moving skeletons ahead of the bulldozers.
The city eventually lost the records of Knox's whereabouts. But Garitty was able to get a death certificate and used Knox's military records to prove he had served. He convinced VA that the remains had been lost, which rendered him eligible for a plaque, which Garitty and Ward mounted alongside two other memorials on the hillside.
He and Ward say Green Mount may have hundreds more veterans in unmarked graves. They'd like to mark all the ones they can.
'It's a good way to serve other people,' Ward said.