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1861–1865 · decoration-absence checks, war by war
The Hamilton stones name eleven soldiers with their regiments (the wars file carries them): an Illinois infantryman of 1864–65, David Eaton; Lewellyn Faurote of the 27th Indiana, dead in August 1865; Nathaniel S. Cory Faurote, Ezra Fox and Virgil Reynolds of the 75th, 83rd and 29th Indiana; William Reynolds; John McCurdy of the 9th Illinois Cavalry, his stone bearing a G.A.R. marker; and Sergeant Lewis Parker. The sketches add five more, Bryant, Campbell, McKinsey, John D. White and Wenger. Against the county histories, the Roll of Honor, the cemetery inscriptions and the state rolls, the check is uniform: no medal, no citation, no brevet, no mention in dispatches attaches to any of them. The one distinction the ground itself conferred is older and stranger: two of its churchyard dead — Frederick Druliner and James Ranstead — served under Washington, and one, Moses Ivins, marched in 1812; the township's heroes begin as veterans of the republic's first wars who chose this prairie to be old in. The Virgil Reynolds conflict stands here in its sharpest form, as the leg requires conflicts to stand: the Indianapolis News, reprinted by Howard, names a Virgil Reynolds among the War of 1812 veterans buried at Hamilton; the DAR transcription of the Hamilton stones names a Virgil Reynolds of Company F, 29th Indiana Infantry, a Civil War regiment in which no soldier of 1812 could have served. If the stones' man and the News's man are one, the News errs; if two men of one name — as the Reynolds generations in that churchyard make likely — both stand. this section prints both records and adopts neither.
Sources
- DAR cemetery inscriptions, Hamilton Cemetery, as cited in the wars file.
- Howard (1907), vol. 1 (the Indianapolis News burial list); Chapman (1880), Roll of Honor and sketches.