| Civil War Medal of Honor recipient’s grave left unmarked
for 99 years The Forgotten Hero By Randy Fletcher On Saturday, May 30, 2009, the Sons of Union Veterans of the Civil War will dedicate a new statue at the Grand Army of the Republic cemetery in southwest Portland. The ceremony features a brass band, a military honor guard in full Civil War attire, a musket salute, and a bugler playing taps. The Daughters of Union Veterans will lay a wreath at the base of the monument. The  observance culminates two years of
work by the Sons of Union Veterans and Metro Pioneer Cemeteries and
completes a renaissance of the cemetery that began five years ago when
a Portland man journeyed there to photograph the grave of a Medal of
Honor winner.Roy Vanderhoof likes to take pictures. Driving his car down Terwilliger Boulevard on his way to the Grand Army of the Republic Cemetery, he planned to photograph the grave of Hartwell Compson, a Union cavalry officer who had received the Medal of Honor in the Civil War. Vanderhoof had come across a website, Home of the Heroes, which listed the burial sites of Medal of Honor recipients. While photographs of many graves in other states had been posted to the website, few of the final resting-places of the fifteen Medal of Honor winners buried in Oregon were pictured. Vanderhoof decided he would be the person to record the visual history of the final resting-places of these American heroes. Vanderhoof thought photographing the grave would be simple because Compson was buried just a few miles from his Portland home. As it turned out, the cemetery itself was not easy to find. Located on Boones Ferry Road, the two-acre Grand Army of the Republic Cemetery is located adjacent to a much larger graveyard – Greenwood Hills Cemetery. Although the G.A.R. is a separate entity, it is not marked from the road and you must turn in to Greenwood Hills to find it. Once he found the place, Vanderhoof parked his car and headed down the hill to find Compson’s grave located in Section 4, plot 136A. He found the section marker underneath a tree, but where the headstone should be was an empty patch of ground. He rechecked the plot number and searched the surrounding area. Nothing. Incredibly, an American war hero was buried in an unmarked grave! Vanderhoof would do something about that but, on that day, he stood and stared in disbelief at a barren piece of Oregon earth. Hartwell Compson in the Civil War One hundred forty years earlier, a young Hartwell Compson stared in disbelief himself. In the  heat of
battle, through the smoke and stench
and sound of gunfire; a colorful movement caught his eye. Compson was a
Union Army officer, a Lieutenant Colonel, currently in command of the
8th New York Cavalry
Regiment. Compson, the second of thirteen children
born to Jonas and Ruth Compson, was raised on his parent’s farm near
Tyre, New York. Compson was nineteen when he joined the 8th New York as
a private in September 1861. Proving himself a talented and respected
soldier, Compson rose swiftly through the ranks, advancing to corporal
and then sergeant. He was commissioned a Second Lieutenant on April 15,
1863 and promoted to First Lieutenant four months later. In March of 1864 Compson was promoted to Captain and placed in command of a cavalry troop. Appointed Major in December 1864 he was made commander of the 8th New York Cavalry and breveted to Lieutenant Colonel of U.S. Volunteers on February 28, 1865. By the end of the war, the valiant Compson had fought in forty-five major engagements including Fredericksburg, Gettysburg, and Cold Harbor. He was wounded twice and had two horses shot from beneath him. A week after assuming command of the 8th, Lt. Col. Compson found himself facing Confederate forces outside Waynesboro, Virginia. A seasoned veteran at twenty-two years of age, Compson was the youngest regimental commander in a cavalry division  commanded by the boy
general: George Armstrong Custer.
At Waynesboro, Custer split his cavalry brigades into two forces. At two in the afternoon Custer ordered three of his regiments, each man armed with a Spencer repeating rifle, to dismount and attack the enemy flank from a heavily wooded area. In a simultaneous assault, Union artillery opened fire and Custer’s mounted regiments, including the 8th New York, charged the opposite Confederate flank and crashed through to the center of the battle line. Compson led his Yankee horse cavalry past Rebel cannon where his men fought hand to hand with Confederate infantry. The clash of cold steel as cavalry sword struck bayonet and musket barrel filled Compson’s head. It was then that movement and color caught Compson’s eye causing him to stare, at least momentarily, in amazement. Confederate General moves forward What Compson spotted was the red and white flag of a Confederate Army Headquarters. The enemy commander, Lieutenant General Jubal Early was leading his staff to the front lines to  personally direct the battle.
Compson did not hesitate: With a bugler at one side and a flag bearer
on his other side, the colonel spurred his horse and led a charge
directly at the Rebel officers. Compson zeroed in on the enemy flag.
Seizing the flagstaff with one hand, Compson swung the back of his
heavy cavalry saber at the enemy color bearer who refused to relinquish
his charge. Suddenly, the battle between four thousand soldiers was
reduced to two men: close, personal, desperate, and bloody. A final
blow from Compson’s sword unhorsed the brave opponent who was never to
rise again and Compson held the enemy colors. In the meantime the
Confederate senior officers had scattered in disarray. The Union rout
was on.Compson handed the flag to one of his men and dashed after the Rebels. General Early had escaped across a bridge but some of his senior aides were captured. By the end of the day, Compson’s regiment alone had taken eight hundred prisoners, five pieces of artillery, fifteen hundred stands of small arms, and captured eight enemy battle flags. Other Federal regiments captured additional nine flags. Twenty-first century Americans often fail to understand the significance of military flags in the 19th century. Not only were the flags symbols of pride and great honor, they held strategic importance too. A commander could identify the location of individual regiments on the battlefield by locating their large standards. The headquarters flag that Compson captured signaled the presence of the commanding general on the field of conflict: His presence meant to rally the commander’s men to victory. Although General Early had escaped the fate of his flag, Waynesboro would be his last major battle. His army had been destroyed. When Custer’s commander, Major General Phil Sheridan, arrived on the battlefield to assess the result of the fighting, the twenty-five year old Custer greeted his boss with a display typical of the boy general’s flamboyance. Each of the seventeen captured Rebel flags was paraded, streaming in the wind by a Union cavalryman. It was a great spectacle and the sort of thing Custer thoroughly enjoyed. That evening, Compson was summoned to Sheridan’s headquarters where he received the personal compliments of Sheridan and Custer and received a battlefield promotion to full Colonel. Compson was assigned to carry dispatches from Sheridan to Washington D.C. and to personally deliver the captured flags to the Secretary of War. While in Washington, March 26, 1865, Brevet Colonel Thomas Hartwell Benton Compson was awarded the Congressional Medal of 
Honor
for the capture of General Early’s headquarters flag at the Battle of
Waynesboro. Unlike many veterans whose heroics were not recognized
until decades after the Civil War, Compson received his medal less than
thirty days after the battle. In addition to the medal, Compson was
granted a thirty-day leave and free transportation to any part of the
country he cared to travel to. Compson used his time off to visit his
wife Mary in western New York State.Compson heads West By the time Compson returned to his regiment, Robert E. Lee had surrendered to General Grant. Union victory brought an end to this stage of Compson’s military career. He road at the head of his 8th New York Cavalry in the Grand Review of the Union Army in Washington D.C. He mustered out of the army with his regiment on June 27, 1865. The hero was once again a civilian. Peace sent Compson back to his New York home where Hartwell and Mary soon had a baby girl. The adventures and tribulations of the war had made Compson restless and, like many Civil War veterans, he soon headed west. In 1870 he was living in Grand Rapids, Michigan where he made his living as a carpenter. In 1880 Compson was trying his luck in the silver mines of Frisco, Utah while his wife and daughter lived in Chicago. The Compson’s eventually divorced and Mary returned to New York where she lived with her sister-in-law. Moving often and trying his hand at many trades, Compson served stints as a U.S. Marshal and Postmaster, and worked as a farmer. By 1887 he was teaching on the Klamath Indian Reservation in southern Oregon. It was in Oregon that Compson again rose to prominence. His  war record
earned him an appointment as Brigadier General of the Oregon National
Guard and President of the State Military Board. Compson would be
addressed as “General” for the rest of his life.Leaving Klamath Falls, General Compson moved to Portland where he worked as a real estate broker and kept a home at 186 Morrison Street. He developed an active interest in Oregon politics and was mentioned as a possible candidate for governor. The Grand Army of the Republic named its St. Johns post in his honor. The general died in Portland on August 31, 1905. He was sixty-three years old. Compson was laid to rest with his Civil War comrades at the Grand Army of the Republic Cemetery. Records indicate that a monument was planned for his grave but one was never erected. Time passed and Compson’s burial plot remained unmarked as his memory faded and a century passed. A hero for a hero Roy Vanderhoof doesn’t consider himself a hero, just an ordinary man put in a situation where he could do some good; but that’s what a hero is. After discovering Compson’s grave unmarked, Vanderhoof sprung into action. He contacted the Department of Veteran’s Affairs, which will provide a free headstone for any U.S. serviceman or servicewoman. Congresswoman Darlene Hooley helped by expediting the request. The Northwest Cavalry Association and Civil War reenactors arranged for a dedication ceremony. On a fall Saturday in 2004, ninety-nine years after his death, more than two hundred people attended the dedication of a new headstone for Hartwell Compson, an American hero no longer forgotten. Descendants of Union veterans restore cemetery The Grand Army of the Republic Cemetery holds the remains of more than two hundred fifty Civil War veterans, including two women nurses, three African American soldiers, and Salmon Brown, the son of abolitionist John Brown. Since the 2004 ceremony for Compson, thirty-six other unmarked graves of Civil War veterans buried at the G.A.R. Cemetery have received government issued headstones. These grave restorations are the work of the Colonel Edward D. Baker Camp of the Sons of Union Veterans of the Civil War. SUVCW commander Tony Pasillas states that there are more than twenty thousand Civil War veterans buried in Oregon, many of them forgotten in unmarked graves. The SUVCW is committed to identifying, and when necessary, marking the final resting places of every veteran of the Civil War, North or South. Lowe’s Home Improvement donated concrete for the G.A.R. project and Farmers Insurance Group donated $500 cash and provided volunteer labor. Pasillas reports that the Baker Camp will install its one-hundredth veteran’s headstone in Oregon sometime this summer. When General Compson was buried in 1905, a six-foot tall bronze statue of a Union soldier stood guard over the departed soldiers of the G.A.R. Cemetery. When Compson’s headstone was dedicated in 2004, the effigy had vanished: its pedestal had stood empty since 1967 when metal thieves stole the statue. In 2007 the Oregon Parks and Recreation Department initiated the Veterans and War Memorials grant program. The grants, authorized by the State Legislature, are funded by lottery dollars. The Baker Camp of the Sons of Union Veterans applied for funds to replace the stolen monument and received the very first award under the program. The result is the first new Civil War statue erected in the Pacific Northwest in one hundred years Portland artist Jason Pope was commissioned to design the statue based on newspaper pictures of the original figure, similar existing monuments in other parts of the country, and a life model of  Civil War
reenactor and Baker Camp member Kelly Scott. Parks Bronze Foundry of
Enterprise, Oregon cast the life-sized infantryman. The dedication ceremony will take place at twelve o’clock noon on Saturday, May 30th, the traditional date of Decoration Day, proclaimed in 1866 by the Grand Army of the Republic. The Sons of Union Veterans’ Pasillas said, “The musket volleys and the lone bugler blowing taps is guaranteed to bring tears to your eyes.” The G.A.R. Cemetery is located at 9002 SW Boones Ferry Road, within the gates of Greenwood Hills Cemetery. . For more information contact Randy Fletcher at fletcher.randy@comcast.net © 2009 Randy Fletcher All images from public domain sources. Bibliography upon request |