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Help sought for a timeworn memorial

In 1879 the survivors of Battery B, 1st Pennsylvania Light Artillery—often called “Cooper’s Battery” after James H. Cooper, the battery’s captain—put up a small monument on Gettysburg’s Cemetery Hill to commemorate their role in silencing Confederate artillery on July 2. When Keith Foote and some friends visited the monument in 2010, they were dismayed to see that erosion had nearly erased the inscriptions on the memorial’s eight-sided marble cap. Foote decided to form and spearhead the Cooper’s Battery B Capstone Monument Replacement Project, in an effort to raise the $10,000 cost of having a new cap made.  After three years, $6,000 has been raised toward this worthwhile project. The replacement cap has been ordered from Vermont and is currently scheduled for installation in mid-November 2013. Donations to help the Replacement Project reach the full amount needed can be sent to Capstone Replacement, 4671 Upper Road, Shamokin, PA 17872. Any funds in excess of the $10,000 will be turned over to the Pennsylvania Gettysburg Monument Project, earmarked for future care of the Cooper’s Battery memorial. A new museum to be built near Mount Jackson, Pa., the home of the original battery, will preserve and display the original marble cap.

Soldier Loses Head at Colorado Cemetery

For weeks, police were looking for the vandals who had knocked over more than 100 headstones on August 9 at a private cemetery in Longmont, Colo., and pulled down a 1909 memorial statue of a Civil War soldier, making off with its 100-pound head.

Since then, the police have identified eight suspects and found the head, which was left outside a local fire station. They’re now processing the head, looking for DNA evidence. Town officials estimate the cost of restoring or replacing the stone statue is $40,000.

In two separate incidents in July, the Mountain View Cemetery was also vandalized. The governing board did not notify police in July because the maintenance crew was able to straighten the stones that had been pushed over, according to news stories.

Banner Memories

Save It: A Confederate naval flag snatched from CSS Hampton by Lieutenant William Ladd as U.S. troops moved into Richmond on April 3, 1865, will be conserved and displayed at the Hampton Roads Naval Museum. The ensign was transferred to that museum by the Harrisonburg-Rockingham Historical Society, which had owned the flag since the 1960s.

How the society came to have the flag continues to be a mystery. What is known is that Ladd took it with him when he went back home to Milton, Mass. It stayed in his family for about a century before being sent to Harrisonburg about 50 years ago. The fragile ensign was found by society members during a search of the archives in 2011, with a note attached explaining what it was. After exploring the cost of restoring the flag, the society voted to hand it over to an organization that had the money to conserve it and would agree to put the artifact on public display.

Fly It: The Confederate flag is at the center of yet another controversy, this one in Richmond, where a group called the Virginia Flaggers plans to install a 150-foot pole to fly a 10-by-15 foot banner that will be visible to northbound drivers on I-95. The NAACP has objected, saying the flag display would hurt tourism and make Richmond “look like a backwater, trailer-park, hick town.”

The Flaggers counter by saying the flag “will tell people that everyone is welcome” and the flag will provide recognition of the pride many in Richmond feel for the city’s rich Confederate history. The group plans to have their flag in place by the end of September.

Fold It: A federal court in Richmond has refused to overturn a decision by the city council in Lexington to ban flying the Confederate flag from public poles, in a case brought by the local Sons of Confederate Veterans. In past celebrations of Lee-Jackson Day, the main street through Lexington has been aflutter with dozens of Confederate flags displayed on city-owned poles. When the ban took effect last year, volunteers held the Confederate flag aloft in front of those poles.

Gettysburg’s Black Residents

As early as mid-June 1863, with word of Lee’s invasion spreading, African Americans in the Gettysburg region began fleeing north, fearful they would be captured and sent into slavery. One hundred and fifty years later, Gettysburg’s small black community wants local residents and the visiting public to know not only about the African-American residents of Gettysburg, but the role African Americans played in the Battle of Gettysburg and the long Civil Rights struggle that followed. To tell that story, residents have begun collecting material for a museum, including photographs, historical records and oral histories. It’s presently housed in a small temporary space.

The mission is to chronicle the black soldiers who fought in the battle and the black men who worked for the army, as well as the local residents employed to bury the thousands who died on the battlefield or at field hospitals. That story is not well known, say the organizers, and neither is the segregation that blacks experienced in Gettysburg well into the 1960s.

 

Originally published in the December 2013 issue of Civil War Times. To subscribe, click here.