Genealogy for Samuel Clay Weaver (1910 - 1916) family tree on Geni, with over 230 million profiles of ancestors and living relatives. As many as nine rebels were accidently buried among their Yankee foes, according to the National Park Service.). No soldier killed at Gettysburg ended up in the National Cemetery by divine intervention. . The constant farming over the graves, the remains were generally yielding to decay or absorption, and hence the work had to be done then or never, he wrote years later. Appalling post-battle scenes had prompted Pennsylvania Gov. JAMES H. LANE Gettysburg 1911 Civil War Portrait RRC Panel RARE! One of the more mysterious characters in the # daystodedication story is Samuel Weaver. He had been awarded $1,356, on paper, but Congress never released the funds to repay him.) Biggs and another man then used their horse teams to take the coffins to the new cemetery for reburial. An appeal published in newspapers across the South raised enough money to allow the ladies to buy land and gather the remains of 2,489 Confederate soldiers who had been buried in scattered places across the lower Shenandoah Valley. Biggs also discovered that forty-five dead Confederates were buried on the farm, according to the website Pennsylvania Quest for Freedom. The Confederate section of Hollywood Cemetery contains a mixture of identified and unidentified graves. Laboring under the shadow of the Soldiers National Cemetery, Creighton writes, the Sons of Good Will struggled to find and maintain a place to bury black veterans.. All the lawyers in the land cannot wipe out the sacred obligation imposed on the Association for its liquidation.. Photographs of soldiers corpses remind us of the unfathomable human cost of the Civil Warboth for the nation as a whole, as Drew Faust writes in This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War, and for individual families. Heres what Guelzo wrote in an email to me Oct. 2: Theres no record that segregation was ever an explicit policy in organizing the Soldiers National Cemetery. Battlefield dead were most often buried haphazardly. Basil Biggs toiled that soil as his own and, when opportunity presented itself, proved, once again, that he could do right by the nation and his family. GETTYSBURG, Pa. Four score and 79 years ago this Saturday, Abraham Lincoln stood up in the newly dedicated cemetery for Union soldiers who fell at Gettysburg and delivered one . Egerton responded by calling upon a number of people in Richmond whom she thought might have some influence in the matter, among them Stiles and Dr. Hunter McGuire, and members of the now-revived HMA. Gettysburg National Cemetery is a United States national cemetery created for Union casualties from the Battle of Gettysburg in the American Civil War. Neither the Northern nor Southern armies were prepared for the Civil Wars scale of death. His efforts are noted on a beautiful monument erected in Raleighs Oakwood Cemetery in 1997, where 137 sets of remains that Weaver recovered were reinterred in 1871. Rufus Weaver had been born in Gettysburg and by 1869 was finishing his medical studies and was a demonstrator of anatomy at Philadelphias Hahnemann Medical College. Rufus initially refused the request because he was busy nurturing his medical career, but he was the only one that had access to his fathers records and the knowledge to find the burials, so after several months of pressure he agreed to help. Instead, the serenity we see today was, in 1863, a horrifying scene of carnage everywhere one looked, and it took months of strenuous, stomach-turning labor to transform the ghastly aftermath into a proper place of burial where the living of the townand the nation as a wholecould commune with the dead through prayer and song. But since then, historians, including Creighton, William Switala and James Paradis, have helped us understand how Basil Biggs took part in this complex and dangerous operation. He billed the ladies $2,151 for these shipments, for which he received payments totaling $880. We are sad to announce that on November 21, 2022, at the age of 90, William Samuel Weaver of Carlisle, Pennsylvania passed away. Reading Biggs headstone, we learn that he died June 6, 1906, 38 years before the date June 6 would be sealed in world memory as D-Day. By the spring of 1871, he was a lecturer in anatomy at Hahnemann Medical College. However, the graves of men who had fallen in far-off places like Antietam and Gettysburg were beyond the ladies reach, both physically and financially. It appears that Egerton might have taken a different tack this time, for in 1902 a member of the Richmond chapter of the Daughters of the Confederacy reported to the HMA that an appeal had been made to UDC chapters across the South for the funds needed to pay the remaining debt owed to Weaver. Most of these local organizations fundraised and solicited donations in order to locate, exhume, and reinter the Confederate dead into local or Confederate cemeteries, but struggled financially throughout the process. It was established at the "Camp, U.S. Samuel Weaver reported 3,512 total Union bodies "taken up and removed to the Soldiers' National Cemetery" October 27-March 18.: . led by local merchant Samuel Weaver. Invalid memorial. According to an article written in 1929, Rose refused to let the bodies be removed unless the ladies were willing to pay for them. Ada was active in efforts to provide aid to Confederate prisoners at Point Lookout in Southern Maryland during the war, and after the war was very involved with the Southern Relief Society. There the graves of soldiers who fought to preserve the Union were protected, cared for, and decorated on the new holiday known as Memorial Day. Pinterest. newsletter for the best of the past, delivered every Monday and Thursday. can say with the greatest satisfaction to myself and to the friends of the soldiers that I saw every body taken out of its temporary resting place, and all the pockets carefully searched.. Subscribe to our HistoryNet Now! Feb 25, 2012 - Samuel Weaver supervised the exhumation of Union soldiers from the battlefield and surrounding communities so[.] 1810-1813 Marriage Notices from The Centinel newspaper, in Gettysburg, Adams County, Pennsylvania. But Blocher demanded to be paid for allowing the remains to rest in the ground as long as they had. Most were the simple items that the average Billy Yank might carry a comb, a pipe, a toothbrush, a knife, a fork and a spoon. Her thesis A Question of Life or Death: Suicide and Survival in the Union Army examines wartime suicide among Union soldiers, its causes, and the reasons that army saw a relatively low suicide rate. He has been a general assignment reporter at the Philadelphia Bulletin, an urban affairs and state feature writer at the Philadelphia Inquirer, and a Pentagon correspondent at Knight Ridder newspapers. FOR SALE! These 7 Foreigners Helped Win the American Revolution. They suggested that the ladies sign over to Dr. Weaver their claim against R.H. Maury & Co., amounting to about $3,800 at that time, acknowledging that that amount fell far short of the approximately $12,000 owed. Shop sales in every category.Uh-oh, overstock: Wayfair put their surplus on sale for up to 50% off. Instrumental in that process was teamster Samuel Weaver, who was hired as superintendent for the exhuming of bodies from the battlefield. We will review the memorials and decide if they should be merged. Rebel clothing was cotton, and gray or brown in color. Once again, Basil found himself at the center of history. As always, you can find more Amazing Facts About the Negro onThe Root, and check back each week as we count to 100. Delivering up to one hundred bodies per day, Weaver kept careful notes on each burial he located in order to determine identity, allegiance, and preserve personal effects for the families. He wrote a story of grief . He sent another 256 in June and a final 73 in early October. in Economics from the University of Virginia and an MBA from Dartmouth College. Because the Cemetery was set aside for the burial of the Union deadand because no enlisted black soldiers fought at Gettysburgthe issue seems never to have come up, at least explicitly. . He has a large practice and his residence is a magnificent one, surrounded by one hundred and twenty acres of land.. In no instance was a body allowed to be removed which had any portion of the rebel clothing on it, Weaver reported. From Virginia, the prominent Hollywood Memorial Association based in Richmond approached Weaver to claim the dead from their state. I then saw the body, with all the hair and all the particles of bone, carefully placed in the coffin.. About a decade later . By 1870 he was a medical doctor. Others, when solicited, claimed to have no memory of any such obligations. Samuel lived in 1900, at address, Missouri. - $27.27. Explore. Janet S. McCabe volunteers at the George Spangler Farm & Field Hospital at Gettysburg and is a lifelong student of Civil War history. He and his team were searching only for boys in blue our fallen heroes to be removed to Gettysburgs new National Cemetery. The first states to raise money to reinter their Gettysburg dead were Georgia, North Carolina, and South Carolina, and in the spring and summer of 1871 Weaver exhumed and shipped 137 Confederates to Raleigh, 74 to Charleston, 101 to Savannah, and a few to Maryland, along with a few individual officers who were claimed by family. People Projects Discussions Surnames In today's post, Gettysburg Licensed Battlefield Guide Deb Novotny describes some highlights of the life of Samuel Weaver, one of . A white Gettysburg resident, F.W. It was a gruesome task. As that information becomes available, this list will be updated to include the new . 03/20/60 - married Andrew Fritz), Samuel David (b. Eight years later, in December 1901, he wrote again to Egerton, asking if she would again go to Richmond, either with him or on her own. Dr. Samuel Weaver son of Samuel Weaver, gave them their sons back. Rose was not the only local farmer who saw the efforts to remove Confederate dead as an opportunity to recoup financial losses suffered during the battle. She was a member of the three-woman committee appointed to distribute funds allocated for the relief of Virginia. Whatever the cause, he allowed more than a hint of frustration to seep into this letter. The reburial work moved decorously. He was the son of the late Roy S. and Hilda M. (Wolfe) Weaver. In the months and years after the titanic Civil War battle here in July 1863, Weaver was part of a vast and grisly enterprise in which the bodies of thousands of soldiers, first Union and then Confederate, were exhumed and moved. (Biggs, as we will learn later, had steep experience in these matters!) For three hot summers, Rufus Weaver toiled to retrieve remains from battlefield graves. It was not long before Weaver heard from the Virginians. The historic Battle of Gettysburg was the result. He suhsequently practiced law for two years with his uncle, Isiah Dill, at Hanptaville, Ala. but in 1860 returned to this state, settling in Lewisburg. The UDC was a product of the 1890s, and its membership and influence were beginning to eclipse that of the older memorial associations. It would have been far too dangerous for everyone involved. . Son of Thomas Weaver and Margaret (Cowper) Weaver. Those were the last payments he would receive. Nov. 18, 2022. After the Battle of Gettysburg Samuel was appointed by Pennsylvania governor Andrew Curtain to oversee the exhumation of Union soldiers for . Follow him onTwitterandFacebook. Originally, the Hollywood Memorial Association intended only to claim the Virginia dead, but during the winter of 1871-1872 they decided to expand their project to claiming all the remaining Confederate dead from Gettysburg and began raising funds to meet Weavers charge of $3.25 per body. Then his remains were found, identified and given a proper burial. . The third result is Samuel A Weaver age 80+ in Pittsburgh, PA in the Upper Lawrenceville neighborhood. Exhumations of the estimated 2,500-3,000 bodies remaining on the field began on April 19, 1872. . Kate Pleasants Minor, the new secretary of the HMA, referred to it as thunder in a clear sky. Many who were members in 1871-73 had died or moved away. The son of Samuel & Elizabeth Ann (Reinhard) Weaver, in 1860 he was an artist living in Gettysburg, Adams County, Pennsylvania, but the 1863 draft registration lists him as a visitor to Hanover, York County, where he apparently lived the bulk of his remaining life. During the summer of 1872, at least, he employed what he referred to as a full force of laborers in order to complete the work as quickly as possible, and Weaver was paying the men out of his own pocket. To that end, the Sons of Good Will put up the money to buy half an acre, which, to echo Lincolns Gettysburg Address, would provide for black soldiers a final resting place for those who gave their lives that that nation might live. They called it theSons of Good Will Cemetery, which, over time, came to be known as Lincoln Cemetery. How could an obligation of this size have been created? Every now and then I read in the papers of work going on in raising money for the erection of monuments etc. Leander Warren, who helped carry the bodies from Gettysburg when he was 13 years old, recalled this arrangement in a 1936 article in the Gettysburg Star and Sentinel: Basil Biggs, colored, of Gettysburg, was given the contract for disinterring the bodies on the field. Many of the women wives, mothers, or sweethearts fainted or became hysterical when the bodies were uncovered. Soldiers were generally buried where they fell, and any farmers field was likely to contain a grave. Gen. Joseph Kershaws Brigade advanced on the afternoon of July 2, and from the cemetery and orchard near the Black Horse Tavern on the Fairfield Road, which served as the field hospital for Kershaws Brigade. Among his greatest accomplishments was his complete dissection of the . ET on PBS), I learned something that took myand Annasbreath away. They found soldiers everywhere, in every condition. He is also editor-in-chief ofThe Root. (b . Soon enough, though, the challenge of proper burial . Weaver reported that 979 of the bodies he exhumed were nameless.. When Samuel W. Weaver was born on 21 January 1862, in Pennsylvania, United States, his father, Jacob Boger Weaver, was 29 and his mother, Catherine Carroll, was 24. For three hot summers, Rufus Weaver toiled to retrieve Confederate soldiers remains from crude Gettysburg battlefield graves. We never undertook to collect anything from the Maury estate.Of course if any of this money had been paid to us we would have needed no reminder from you that we had agreed to turn it over to you.. With more than 50,000 estimated casualties, the three-day engagement was the bloodiest single battle of the conflict. In addition, Kathleen has been a seasonal interpreter at Fredericksburg & Spotsylvania National Military Park since 2010 and has worked on various other publications and projects. Weaver agreed to forgo the interest if the original principal of $6,356 could be paid. There was not a grave permitted to be opened or a body searched unless I was present, Weaver, a Gettysburg merchant hired to supervise the exhumations, wrote the year after the battle. Each time a dead soldier was dug up on the shattered battlefield here, the short, bearded figure of Samuel Weaver was there with his iron hook to ensure that it was not a rebel. In a December 25, 1878, letter written apparently to Mrs. Brown, Egerton complained that she had written you from time to time for the past three years on this subject without one word of reply and informed her that she had asked Stiles and Judge J.H.C. Many of the photographs taken during the cemetery's consecration ceremonies have been attributed to the Weavers. And another unknown soldier was found with a handkerchief spread over his face. They would not finish their workwhich amounted to more than 3500 corpsesuntil the Middle of March 1864. In other words, it took President Lincoln little more than two minutes to orate what he had written, while it took Biggs and his crew four months to finish their grisly task. This page lists soldiers named August Sungrist through Isaac Sweeney who served in Pennsylvania infantry units during the Civil War. The routes were treacherous and rife with slave catchers and informants. 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