Las Vegas Review-Journal (Sunday)
PRESERVING HISTORY
Illinois students restore Civil War tombstones
CHICAGO — With more than a century of rain, wind, snow and pollution conspiring to erase what was once carved into a row of headstones, about the only thing anyone in the tiny north-central Illinois community of Odell knew of the men buried there was that they had fought in the Civil War.
That will be different this Memorial Day at Odell Township Cemetery, thanks to scientific detective work by local high school students and a federal government agency that was impressed enough with their work to send new grave markers to the community 90 miles southwest of Chicago.
“These kids gave these men their identity back,” said Harold Schook, a 74-year-old Air Force veteran who every year plants small American flags near area veterans’ graves with his American Legion buddies.
The last three of five new headstones arrived last month and were put in place with the others — the final chapter in a story that began a couple years ago when Schook contacted Paul Ritter, a high school science teacher at Pontiac Township High School who had his students study the effects of acid rain on grave markers.
Maybe, Schook suggested, the students could discover the names of the men who were identified simply as “soldier” in the cemetery’s plat map.
The chance to solve the mystery proved irresistible.
“They left their families, some forever, to fight for their country,” said Seth Cunningham, 18. “The least we could do was give them their names back so people can know who they are.”
The students tried etching the tombstones, then smearing them with shaving cream, knowing that tiny ridges can appear when it dissolves. Nothing worked.
At the suggestion of a student, they took a color photograph of the markers, and then turned it black and white. Nothing again. But when they reversed those two colors: “We started (seeing) some letters,” Ritter said.
Using those letters, the students compared them with a registry of the 157 Civil War veterans in Livingston County, Ritter said. Before long, they had their five names: James Wightman, Warren Newton, William Dudley, Thomas Thompson and Thomas McNulty Vincent.
The students then went to work finding out all they could about the five; at least one died in battle.
“After fighting off two waves of Confederate soldiers, Capt. Wightman was shot by a single enemy from a flank in the third wave,” the students wrote in one of their eulogies of the men. “Before he fell, Capt. Wightman rallied troops as he stood atop the fortifications and waved his sword, celebrating their recent victory.”
LOS ANGELES — Memorials to veterans in a Los Angeles neighborhood and a town in Kentucky, as well as a Civil War veterans cemetery in Virginia, were vandalized as the nation prepares to mark Memorial Day, officials said.
A Vietnam War memorial in the Venice area of Los Angeles has been defaced by graffiti. The vandalism occurred sometime during the past week, KCAL/KCBS-TV reported. The homespun memorial painted on a block-long wall on Pacific Avenue lists the names of American service members missing in action or otherwise unaccounted for in Southeast Asia.
News of the vandalism came as another veterans-related memorial was reported damaged in Henderson, Kentucky. Police say a Memorial Day cross display there that honors the names of 5,000 veterans of conflicts dating back to the Revolutionary War has been vandalized by a driver who plowed through the crosses early Saturday.
The driver, a 27-year-old local man, was arrested, but investigators didn’t know whether the vandalism was deliberate.
In Virginia, the Petersburg National Battlefield has has been looted, the National Park Service said. Excavations were found at the Civil War battlefield last week, Jeffrey Olson, and agency spokesman, said in a news release Friday. Petersburg National Battlefield is a 2,700-acre park marks where more than 1,000 Union and Confederate soldiers died fighting during the Siege of Petersburg 151 years ago.