“Being a veteran, I wanted to do what I could to be sure all veterans get the recognition they deserve,” says Lyle Garitty, an administrator and historian at Green Mount Cemetery in Baltimore who scours records.
Photos by Jim Burger via Washington Post
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 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 buried in military cemeteries.
The result is a granite plaque on a leafy hillside of the historic graveyard. It reads, in part: “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.
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.
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.
Record-keeping 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.
HOW TO REQUEST A GRAVE MARKER
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 unmarked or marked with a badly deteriorated headstone.
In some cases, VA will even provide a plaque or marker — though 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.
SCOURING THE ARCHIVES
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 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."
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