Transcript
Stephanie: My name is Stephanie Ruquet. I’m with the Jefferson Historical Society and I’m going to tell you about a interesting monument in our town. After the Civil War ended in 1865, plans were made to create a monument honoring local soldiers who had died in that war. The location chosen was in Jefferson’s Evergreen Cemetery. Reuben Shelmandine, a Jefferson farmer active in civic affairs, spearheaded the project. On July 4th, 1868, a huge crowd gathered on Jefferson’s town green. A procession was formed and everyone marched to the cemetery nearby led by Colonel James T. Treadwell of Jefferson and accompanied by the Schoharie Cornet Band, the Jefferson Glee Club, and dignitaries. Reverend Leonard Richards, the Presbyterian minister in Stamford, conducted the service at the gleaming, white, obelisk-shaped stone monument which was formally dedicated “to the memory of the fallen heroes and the perpetuation of those principles of Liberty for which they so nobly offered up their lives.”
High on the south side of the spire of the monument is the legend OUR HEROES. On the same side, on the base, it reads DIED FOR THEIR COUNTRY. On the main part of the monument, around the four sides and in high relief, are the names of twenty-eight men. Carved into the stones are their ages, places where they died, and the dates of their deaths. Six were killed in action, four were mortally wounded in battle, one died as the result of an accidental shooting, and seventeen died from disease including five who died as POWs in Confederate prisons. Twelve of the men served in the 134th NY Volunteer Infantry Regiment. Six were in the 91st NY Infantry, and three served in the 3rd NY Cavalry. The others served in seven different regiments. Eleven of these Fallen Heroes fought in the Battle of Gettysburg and eight of them died as a result of the battle including three who were captured and died as prisoners of war.
Sgt George Payne of the 134th Infantry was captured by Rebel soldiers during the battle and locked in a barn. When the soldiers came to get the sergeant to take him along with thousands of others to Richmond Virginia, they couldn’t find him. Sgt Payne was hiding in the hay and when the coast was clear, he was able to make his way back to his regiment. Sgt Payne was killed in action the following year at the Battle of Rocky Face Ridge in Georgia.
Harvey J. Brown served in the 91st Infantry. In 1862 he was a member of a detachment that went from Florida up into Alabama to retrieve a steamboat a loyalist had secretly offered to the Union navy. After successfully completing that mission, the men rejoined their regiment which by then was in Louisiana. Corporal Brown, now part of the regiment’s color guard, was wounded in the hand at the Siege of Port Hudson. He died five months later from a paralytic condition.
The remains of only four of the soldiers listed on the monument were brought home for burial, and only one of them is buried in Evergreen Cemetery, not far from the monument. Joshua Stanley enlisted in the 3rd Cavalry in September 1864. Five weeks later he was dead of pneumonia, contracted in the line of duty from exposure and fatigue while on outpost duty. Joshua had married earlier that year. His widow Harriet never remarried. When she died sixty-two years later, she was buried with her husband.
In recent years, on the last school day before Memorial Day, men from American Legion Post 1379 in Stamford meet at Jefferson Central School, and together with the school band, march the short distance to Evergreen Cemetery where a brief ceremony is held in front of the monument. This tradition continues today. For 143 years, the monument in Evergreen Cemetery was the only Civil War monument in Schoharie County that honored a group of local Fallen Heroes, until a monument honoring all of Schoharie County’s Civil War dead was erected in 2011 at the Old Stone Fort in Schoharie.