...the life and death of every man...

“In the stars is written

the death of every man.”

~ Chaucer

Just a few weekends ago, I organized a Meetup for the River City Cemetarians group to visit Richmond National Cemetery. Historian, retired teacher, and local author JoAnn Meaker has conducted extensive research of those buried in the cemetery and she agreed to share this with the group. This was exciting for me because it was the first event that was exclusive for our Meetup and we were also Ms. Meaker’s first audience/ test run.

JoAnn Meaker

Richmond National Cemetery is located in Henrico County, Va and is about three miles outside of Richmond city limits. During the American Civil War, the land associated with this cemetery was just within the Confederate’s fortification lines when they were attempting to defend Richmond. It isn’t a spoiler alert that the city burned but that’s another story.

The cemetery is 10 acres in size. Some of the land was purchased in 1867 with additional acreage being purchased in 1868 and then in 1906.

The initial burials were re-interments from other locations including one of my favorite places, Hollywood Cemetery.  Bodies also came from Belle Isle, or Belle Island Confederate Prison which was the location to around 30,000 prisoners of war, Cold Harbor battlefield, and Seven Pines. Many war historians recognize the names of these locations but for me they’re all places from home. I used to walk frequently at Cold Harbor (eek! They have the worst horseflies!); I previously posted about Seven Pines, and Belle Isle is a place where I hung-out in undergrad. It took me many, many moons to make peace with the land from where I’m raised but posts like this one have a way of being a bit haunting. It’s hard to process that THIS is WHERE it happened.

A tree consuming a stone

Meaker is originally from New York where she spent the majority of her life. After retirement, she and her husband moved to the area to be closer to her grandchildren. Her connection with the greater Richmond area goes a bit deeper though. While she is currently doing research about Richmond National Cemetery for a forthcoming book, she already has done some research in the area after finding a Civil War ID tag, which she explains is a precursor to the dog tags military personnel wear today, in her late father-in-law’s coin collection. The ID, which looks very much like a coin, reads “Union Against Rebellion 1861” on one side and “A.J. Beardsley” along with his division on the other.  This one token from Beardsley, a relative of her husband, started her entire journey of research for a fictional novel My Dear Emma, which includes a storyline that follows the real life experiences of Addison Beardsley who fought in the 10th New York Cavalry. All of her research eventually led to her forthcoming publication as well.

Meaker explains that before dog tags many of the soldiers would pin their names to their uniforms; seeing the number of “unknown” soldier listed on the gravestones is a reminder that so many of the dead were never identified. Richmond National Cemetery includes 9,322 soldiers of which 5,706 are unknown.

What I most enjoyed about Meaker’s tour of the cemetery was that she told stories of everyday men. The focus was not on their ranks or in which battles they fought. She shared stories of her husband’s family member, of two men who were struck by lightning, and even of writers. There are actually two known poets resting in the cemetery. This grave is that of Adelbert Older. While it is hard to read the inscription, it is alright because it is incorrect anyway. Older was a subscriber to the children's magazine called Robert Merry's Museum. Pat Pflieger argues, “Robert Merry’s Museum was a popular—though now forgotten—American children’s periodical. Founded in 1841, it offered entertainment and information to readers of all ages during the antebellum years, the Civil War, and Reconstruction, finally merging with the Youth’s Companion after the Boston Fire in 1872” (http://www.merrycoz.org/papers/LURE.xhtml).

Here is a description that I found on Pflieger’s website. Pflieger is an academic who writes, “My research is in a pretty obscure corner of 19th-century American culture, so this is where I organize the little bits of information as I gather it.” Considering my other blog is devoted to posting my own academic research, I tip my hat to the other scholars who construct similar havens.

"Adelbert, a tall Wisconsin farm boy with gray eyes and brown hair, was one of the poets among the subscribers to the Museum: 16 of his poems appeared in the magazine between 1857 and 1865. He enlisted immediately in the Union army when the Civil War broke out, but was discharged within the year due to illness; Adelbert re-elisted with his younger brother, Wallace (born c1842), in February 1864. Both were wounded in a skirmish at Turner’s Farm, in Virginia, on May 31 or June 1, 1864. Wallace died almost immediately; but Adelbert lay all night on the battlefield, and was taken to Richmond as a prisoner of war on June 2. Though on June 5 he wrote a cheerful note to his parents, making light of his injuries (they received the note July 27), Adelbert died three days later. The memorial page featured Belle’s poem in the left column and Adelbert’s poem in the right, with a stanza from “Mustered Out” at the bottom of the page. The patriotic image contains a “liberty cap” against a sword and a scroll, crowned with 13 stars probably emblematic of the 13 original states. The verse beginning “I’m mustered out!” is the last stanza of “Mustered Out,” a poem by the Rev. William E. Miller." http://www.merrycoz.org/museum/OLDER.xhtml

Meaker’s book is set to be published in 2017 on the sesquicentennial of the establishment of the Richmond National Cemetery. From her tour and some of the details which she shared about her book, it’s going to be very interesting. What is striking is how you can walk into a national cemetery and you pretty much see the same marker repeated again and again. Meaker has found a way both to unite the soldiers and to share their individual stories.

Chris in front of my camera!

This picture is taken by the talented Chris Beasley, my cemetarian-brother-from-another-mother ;) If I look awkward, it’s because mid-conversation, Chris says, “Move a bit to your left.” He sees a picture in everything, while my fella says that I see a blog post in everything.

 

The familiar-looking lodge was constructed in 1870 from a design by Quartermaster General Montgomery C. Meigs. Similar lodges are located at Poplar Grove, Seven Pines, and Fredericksburg National Cemeteries.

... art from the ashes...

“The phoenix must burn to emerge.”

~Janet Fitch, White Oleander

On November 2 around 6:36pm, I received the most beautiful gift: a resurrected piece of art I thought I would never see again.

But let me back up, sometime in the early 1990s, my friend Sherrie Miller, who is a talented artist and my first “favorite artist”, used to sketch pieces that would end up hanging in my bedroom. I wrote poetry and had written a series of poems about Claudian the Atheist, an imaginary character whom I had created based on my first “love of my life”’s best friend’s “goth” name. His real name is Ben which is just another bit of connection to my fella who also has a best friend with the same name. As a little side note because I’m being tangential, before I realized that I even had a choice of not having children, I believed that I would name my son Claudian Dyvad. He would have hated me, I’m sure.

Anyway, my Claudian poems were about the character’s various journeys to heaven and hell. His afterlife began when Claudian’s Cessna crashed into a church to which he muttered, “God, what an ending.” I cannot recall why or if I asked but Sherrie illustrated the story around my poem. I still have the original.  Later I asked Sherrie is she would do a painting of the piece. I knew that it would be an artistic interpretation of her original sketch and the two look quite different but it was terribly significant since it was the first piece of art that I had ever commissioned from an artist.

I realize that not giving a name to my first “love of my life” is a bit annoying but I want to respect the anonymity of it all and as I shared in a previous post, I don’t want to come across as a creep considering that I’m Facebook friends with his wife. My previous post actually leads to this one. I wrote, “For years he called my mother to check in on me. I didn't know any of this until 2006 when we reconnected. My mother never said a thing.” I realize this reads a bit like The Notebook by Nicholas Sparks but the truth is he stopped calling my mother a few days before my first wedding when my mother told him that I was getting married.  My mother was not thrilled with me getting married the first time and she told me that the night before my wedding. I remember saying, “I can’t do anything about this now” when she announced that both my father and she believed I was too young. How’s that for weird parenting and timing. Everyone of that time period and many of my friends today know that she could have called off the wedding by simply saying, “X called” or “X has been calling.” But she’s a controller of secrets (a whole other story) and I never knew any of this until he told me. When we parted from that reunion, I called her and screamed at her. She muttered something about she thought it was best. Let me be clear, I don’t think I would have ended up with my first fella. We were too young and both had lots of living to do; we also appear to be happy in our current relationships. But she took away my 22-yr-old self’s choice by not disclosing the phone calls.

I could write that my first husband was awful and in many ways he was. My current fella hates him based on the stories. We were just young and without brains being fully grown, we both made poor choices.

In 1996, he burned all of my letters from my first “love of my life” and then set fire to this painting (and nearly the apartment while I was screaming that he was merely burning them into my soul). He was in a state of jealousy and believed that the character in the painting resembled the image of my former love (and to be fair, it does). 

Fast forward twenty years and Sherrie randomly sends me a digital version of the burned painting I thought I would never see again. I had no idea that she had photographed her work. I opened the message and I became a puddle of tears. Seeing this still makes me cry. I remember it burning; I remember the smell of pictures and letters and paint burning. Letters I had read a hundred times which had been kept so tidy and together with a velvet ribbon stored in a precious box went up in flames.

This doesn’t change the past but it certainly is nice to have a piece of that horrible event resurrect from the flames.

Art from the talented Sherrie Miller.

... novelist, suffragist, social advocate: meeting the late Mary Johnston...

 “Thoughts are the shadows of our feelings - always darker, emptier and simpler.”

~Friedrich Nietzsche

Mary Jonston's grave (left)- picture taken by me

Mary Johnston was an early women's rights advocate, using her wealth and fame to promote the women's suffrage movement. She was a popular writer who wrote what we now consider historical romances. She was also the first woman to top best-seller lists in the twentieth century.

Her first two books, Prisoners of Hope (1898) and To Have and to Hold (1900) focused on colonial times in Virginia. Sir Mortimer (1904) and The Goddess of Reason (1907) use the backdrop of the French Revolution; and, in Lewis Rand (1908) the political life at the dawn of the 19th century was included. Hagar (1913) is arguably the most controversial of her work. Considered to be one of the first feminist novels, Johnston wrote in a semi-autobiographical way about the early efforts of women’s rights with a focus on women’s suffrage. The book created some controversy with women who were more traditionally-focused women and they refused to purchase any more of her novels. Her novel The Witch (1914) was about a woman in seventeenth-century England accused of witchcraft.

Portrait of Mary Johnston

Johnston was ahead of her time. She wrote a short story called "Nemesis" (1923) which depicted the lynching of a black man in a small southern town. The story dramatized the events following the lynching and even included the psychological impact on those involved. This was published seven years before the Association of Southern Women for the Prevention of Lynching was founded. It also appeared five years prior to the Virginia Anti-Lynching Law, the first law in the United States to term lynching a state crime, was passed in 1928.

Walter White, assistant secretary of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), wrote Johnston to say that he had never "read any story on this great national disgrace of ours which moved me as yours did."

On November 27, 1909, a group of women, including Ellen Glasgow and Lila Meade Valentine who are also buried in Hollywood Cemetery with Ms. Glasgow, found the Equal Suffrage League of Virginia.

The World's Work, 1909:

Picture of Mary Johnston

Public Domain

In 1913, in a letter to Lila Meade Valentine, Mary Johnston defends black women and encourages their inclusion in the suffrage movement.

Johnston was close friends with author Margaret Mitchell, who is best known for her novel Gone with the Wind (1936).

Johnston never married. When she died in 1936, playwright Arthur Goodrich gave her eulogy and reflected, "Each generation contributes to the world, too sparingly, its tiny few are the truly great. Mary Johnston was, I believe, one of those few in our time." 

I was fortunate enough to meet Ms. Johnston in Hollywood Cemetery in 2014.

Works Cited

Brooks, Clayton McClure, Samuel P. Menefee and Brendan Wolfe. "Mary Johnston (1870–1936)." Encyclopedia Virginia. Virginia Foundation for the Humanities, 20 Mar. 2014. Web. 13 Nov. 2016.

Johnston, Mary. “Nemesis” The Century Magazine. May 1923. pp.3-22. Web. http://www.unz.org/Pub/Century-1923may. November 2016.