Civil War veterans buried at Dug Hill Cemetery
Among the Civil War veterans who are buried at the Dug Hill Cemetery near Town Center in Bella Vista are brothers George T. and Henry C. Leach.
The brothers’ parents, William and Polly Leach, were married in 1821 in Virginia, and started their family there. That is where George T. Leach was born in 1835, but by the time his younger brother Henry C. was born in 1837, the family had moved to Ohio. The 1850 census shows them still in Ohio, but shortly after that they moved to Illinois where they were living when their father died in 1853, and that’s where they signed up for the Union army.
The Leach brothers signed up together when the 125th Illinois infantry was organized at Danville, Illinois, in September 1862. They entered as privates, and fought in almost every major battle of the middle theater including Perryville, Chickamauga, Chattanooga, Atlanta Campaign, the March to the Sea, and Bentonville, NC. They mustered out as privates in June 1865.
After the war, George’s life was quite different from Henry’s although they evidently both became farmers. There is no record of George having been married prior to his marriage at age 49 to Ann Edwards in April 1884. Ann had been married before for about a year, having been left a widow with a baby daughter. Nine months after Ann and George were married in 1884, their daughter Nellie was born, in January 1885, when George was 50 years old. He died less than two weeks later, in early February, 1885. His grave is the oldest identified grave in the Dug Hill Cemetery.
Ann was nearly 20 years younger than George; she married a third time a few years later to John Sullivan and went on to have five more children. George Leach had left some land to his daughter Nellie, some of which her stepfather John Sullivan sold in her name, since she was a minor. That land is where one of the first churches at Dug Hill, Missionary Baptist, was built in 1898. Ann Sullivan had an additional five children with John Sullivan between 1889 and 1897. In the early 1900’s, they moved to northwest Kansas where he died in 1929, and she died in 1943.
George and Ann’s daughter Nellie went on to marry Charles Burns in 1908 and gave birth to four sons. Their married life was split between Arkansas and northwest Kansas; they moved back and forth a couple of times. Charles died in 1936 but Nellie lived to age 80, dying in 1965. They are both buried in northwest Kansas, at Morland.
George’s younger brother Henry C. Leach went back to Illinois after the Civil War, where he married Emaline Ashby in 1866 when she was 19 and he was 29 years old. Like a number of other Civil War veterans, both Union and Confederate, he gradually found his way to Arkansas. But first he moved to Neosho County in southeastern Kansas, where the 1870 census shows him and
Emaline living, along with his mother, Polly, who had also moved from Illinois to join them there. Polly Leach died there in 1873.
The 1880 census shows that Henry and Emaline had moved to Arkansas, to western Benton County. They had three daughters, with the last one being born in Bentonville in 1891. Emaline died within the following year, and Henry married Amanda Howard in 1893 when he was 56 and she was 27. Henry fathered six more children, three girls and three boys. At the time of the 1900 census they were living in the Dug Hill area, and the 1903 map at the Bella Vista Historical Museum shows property in the name of H. C. Leach just southwest of Dug Hill.
But the 1910 census shows them having moved to the Jane, Missouri, area. Henry’s gravestone does not have a date on it, but his widow applied for his pension in May, 1911 so that is assumed to be his year of death. He was 74 when he died and, like his brother, was buried at Dug Hill. Amanda died two years later, in 1913, at age 47 and is also buried at Dug Hill, as are several other relatives.
For more information about the history of Bella Vista, visit the Bella Vista Historical Museum at 1885 Bella Vista Way (Highway 71 & Kingsland). Admission is free. Regular hours are Thursday through Sunday, 1-5 p.m. To contact the museum call 479-855-2335 or visit online at bellavistamuseum.org.