Touch the Elbow - Blogging the Civil War

Arlington National Cemetery has been in the news lately for a number of reported transgressions, including misidentifying bodies and grave sites, dumping ashes of the cremated in a dirt pile, and using discarded gravestones to prevent soil erosion along a stream’s banks. Now a northern Virginia funeral home with a National Cemetery contract has been fined $50,000 for, among other violations, inappropriately storing the bodies of those waiting burial in a garage.

That this should be happening at any cemetery, least of all Arlington, violates one of the bedrock rules few in life will tolerate. To avoid bringing somebody’s blood to a boil: don’t play around with somebody’s heart; don’t insult somebody’s mother; don’t screw around with somebody’s money; don’t kick somebody’s dog; and, certainly least of all, don’t screw around with the dead, particularly if they have living relatives.


Albert L. Jordan's name was among those listed as wounded in the fighting at Gettysburg on July 2, 1863, suffering what was termed a “slight" wound to the hip. His headstone epitaph, “Free from suffering at last,” bore testimony to the fact that the minie ball that tore through his wallet, and the picture of his wife contained inside, before piercing flesh and shattering bone subjected him to severe and crippling pain for the rest of his days. That the wound was not as slight as first reported is evident by the ten months he spent in the hospital recuperating and that when he walked out of Lovell General Hospital in Portsmouth, Rhode Island with a medical discharge on May 19, 1864 he did so with the aid of crutches. The wallet, by the way, still survives and was kept on display for years behind a bar owned and operated by a distant cousin.

The wound Jordan suffered never fully healed. During surgery performed in 1882 large abscesses discharged bone fragments. A microscopic examination of pus taken from his hip also revealed evidence of threads from his uniform blouse.

Jordan is buried in Section 7, a small knoll that rises in the center of the Union Street Cemetery in Franklin, Massachusetts, along with his wife Clara, daughter Clara Eva, and his in-laws, George W. and Joanna Thompson. According to family tradition, George Thompson, then a Corporal in Company I of the 18th Massachusetts was responsible for recruiting Albert and later his brother Samuel. Whether George did or didn’t entice them to enlist by offering a personal incentive, the brothers wound up marrying George's teenage daughters. Samuel Harris Jordan, my second great-grandfather, is interred in another section of the cemetery with his wife, some of his nine children, and one granddaughter, known to me as “Grammy.” Grammy, nee Florence, is buried next her husband Russell.

I hadn’t been to the Union Street Cemetery in about four years. Walking up the hill in Section 7 toward the Jordan-Thompson graves I knew almost immediately that something was wrong. As I got closer, the reality of what had happened hit me.

I don’t know how much energy it takes to push over a stone weighing a couple of hundred pounds, but I can’t imagine one person doing it alone. After the shock wore off anger set in and my imagination was flooded with an image of me, baseball bat in hand, standing over two fetal positioned jerks holding onto their balls.

I’ve promised George, Joanna, Albert, Clara, Clara Eva, and myself that I will make this right, that I will get the gravestone turned upright on its base again.. Thus far I’ve made one unreturned phone call and sent an email to someone who’s currently on vacation, in an effort to find out what steps need to be taken. I was told by a cemetery worker there's a committee that oversees the Union Street Cemetery and makes decisions on such matters, but I’m already prepared for the possibility of making my own arrangements. We'll see how this all turns out.