Confederate group assists in reburial of Union soldiers

Seven...soldiers whose graves were opened by Hurricane Isabel will be reinterred Sunday in Yorktown National Cemetery...Confederate re-enactors from the area contributed time and money to build caskets modeled on those used at the time of the original burials in 1866, and will participate in the ceremony.

Seven Civil War soldiers whose graves were opened by Hurricane Isabel will be reinterred Sunday in Yorktown National Cemetery.

The men, all Union soldiers who ranged from ages 15 to 21 when they died, are being reburied in a public, Memorial Day weekend ceremony.

Confederate re-enactors from the area contributed time and money to build caskets modeled on those used at the time of the original burials in 1866, and will participate in the ceremony.

"We just thought it was important to make sure the men got a decent funeral, got taken care of properly," said Tim Smith, a boat carpenter who serves as captain of the 1st Texas Infantry re-enactment unit. "We're all Americans. We just thought American soldiers deserve as proper a burial as they can be given."

Smith, whose family business, Smith's Marine Railway, started in the 1840s and was occupied by federal troops during the Civil War, will play taps on bugle for the ceremony.

Smith's group, which represents a Confederate unit that came to Virginia from Texas and stayed throughout the war, will be among as many as 40 re-enactors participating from as far away as Northern Virginia and Pennsylvania, Smith said.

When Hurricane Isabel roared through Virginia on Sept. 18, winds toppled a number of trees that had been grow- ing near the graves since shortly after the cemetery opened in 1866.

National Park Service officials who maintain the cemetery along with the surrounding Yorktown Battlefield discovered that numerous graves were disturbed.

Andrew Veech, archaeologist for Colonial National Historical Park, which includes the battlefield, said this week that teams of archaeologists moved quickly to preserve the remains uncovered when 20 graves were disturbed by the uprooting of 15 large trees.

Many of the more than 2,200 soldiers buried in the cemetery - only 11 were Confederates - were moved there from field burials, so it is unclear how complete the remains were originally, Veech said.

In their work following the hurricane, Veech and his colleagues recovered the remains of seven soldiers. They did not disturb the gravesides looking for remains that might exist deeper than the areas exposed by the fallen trees.

The remains, some nearly intact and others partial, were examined by a military forensic anthropologist, who determined most of the remains were of soldiers whose ages ranged from 15 to 17. The oldest was about 21.

All of the remains being reburied were originally interred as unknown soldiers.

With tree removal and landscape restoration recently completed at the cemetery, Park Service officials planned the reinterment as part of a Memorial Day weekend ceremony conducted there annually.

Diane Depew, a supervisory park ranger, and Chris Bryce, a park ranger, brought in the Civil War re-enactors and also invited Robin Reed, director of public history at the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, to deliver a keynote speech.

Veech, Depew and Bryce worked with volunteers this week to dig the graves.

Smith, the boat-building re-enactor, said he got involved when Depew asked him to recommend someone to build caskets. He and his unit have a close relationship with the park - serving about once a month in Revolutionary War garb - to fire 18-pound siege guns during programs and ceremonies.

Smith said they found a Civil War-era casket to measure as a model, but then scaled down the design to the minimum size that would hold the remains. That was to reduce chances the burials would disturb other graves in the crowded cemetery, he said.

"Except for the size," Smith said, "we tried to be as authentic as we could be in the construction of them."

Smith said he feels fine as a Confederate re-enactor honoring the memory of Union soldiers. An ancestor of his was killed at Gettysburg, he said, and the family was able to track what happened to the body by consulting the records of a Union doctor who kept notes about Confederate dead even after being told to ignore them.

As an American and as a re-enactor, Smith considers himself to have connections to those who fought on both sides.

"It's a part of the past, and we present that as best we can," he said. "And we help people understand the differences and [the process of] coming back together."

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