The military ground of City Cemetery

1832 – today

The ground: City Cemetery, at 214 North Elm Street, is South Bend's oldest cemetery, founded in 1832 on land given by the town's founders, and its National Register nomination carries the cemetery's military record whole. The ground holds, in the nomination's words, "graves of soldiers involved in every major United States military conflict from the Revolutionary War to the Gulf War" — beginning with Peter Roof, a Revolutionary War soldier and the cemetery's first burial. Two military sections organize the veterans' ground: the older, formal section along LaPorte Avenue by the Linden Avenue gate, laid out linear "as protocol demands," where the Civil War dead lie thickest, and a second section southwest of it, where three rows of government-issued marble and brass markers lie flush with the ground in the later manner. The cemetery's own full record lives in its own leg of this history; here it is taken only as the city's first veterans ground.

The Eddy Post's monument, 1914: In the northeastern section, within sight of the gate, stands the Civil War Veterans' Memorial of 1914 — a contributing object of the National Register listing. The nomination describes it closely: a tall four-sided red granite monument on a rusticated gray granite base of two wide blocks, "1861-1865" carved into the face of the base with commemorative language in the shaft above, and carvings on the other three sides. It was raised by the Norman Eddy Post of the Grand Army, which raised the money for it — the second South Bend post, chartered only in 1897, spending its strength on the memory of the war its members had fought as young men. The post's namesake, Colonel Norman Eddy, had commanded the 48th Indiana; the regiment's own dead lay in the rows around the shaft.

The unknown soldier's statue, and its travels: Three years earlier, in 1911, the Woman's Relief Corps had erected a second monument in the ground, dedicated "to the unknown soldier and sailor dead" — a standing soldier figure. In 2003 the statue was moved from the cemetery to the new Military Honor Park at the airport. It arrived headless. In 2005 it was delivered to a fine-arts conservator to be restored and its head recreated; the work took 300 hours, and in 2006 the completed statue was installed at the Honor Park, where it remains — a Grand Army auxiliary's monument of 1911 doing duty, a century on, at the memorial ground of the airport age. Its story is told again from the other end in the Honor Park entry below.

The city's perpetual care, and the tablets of 1937: In 1941 the Common Council resolved that certain lots in City Cemetery be kept in perpetual care at public expense, "for proper respect and gratitude for their services." The lots named in the nomination are a roll of the city's first century: Vice-President Schuyler Colfax; John Auten, the county's first Civil War dead; the founder Lathrop M. Taylor; James and Mary McKinley, the grandparents of a president; and the Revolutionary War veterans Peter Roof Sr. and Isaac Ross. Four years before the resolution, in 1937, two veterans organizations had already set their marks in the ground: a bronze tablet at Colfax's grave, provided by American Legion Post No. 50, and a bronze tablet at the McKinley grandparents' grave, provided by the Harry O. Perkins Camp No. 25 of the United Spanish War Veterans — the Spanish War's own order, named on the ground in the same year as the Legion's. The nomination also names among the cemetery's soldier graves Private Enoch R. Weiss, Company C, 1st U.S. Cavalry, holder of the Medal of Honor for valor against the Apache in the Chiricahua Mountains of Arizona Territory, buried here in 1869.

The ground today: The nomination, written in the present century, records the cemetery in moderate disrepair in places, its Sexton's Cottage repaired and its contributing fabric essentially intact, and it records the use that matters to this section: "Today, the cemetery hosts annual Memorial Day tributes sponsored by various veterans' organizations." The oldest ground in the city is still a working veterans ground, and the 1914 shaft still stands within sight of the gate where the parades used to end.

Sources:

1. National Register of Historic Places nomination, South Bend City Cemetery (National Park Service) — the cemetery's founding and acreage, the two military sections and their arrangement, the 1914 Eddy Post monument and its description, the 1911 Woman's Relief Corps monument and its 2003 move, restoration and 2006 installation at the Military Honor Park, the 1941 perpetual-care resolution and its named lots, the 1937 tablets of American Legion Post No. 50 and the Harry O. Perkins Camp No. 25, USWV, the soldier graves from the Revolutionary War to the Gulf War, Peter Roof, John Auten and Enoch R. Weiss, and the present annual Memorial Day tributes.