My Southern Hometown's Resident Union Soldier -- Private Charles F. Emerson, 15th Maine Infantry USA

The recently cleaned headstone of
Private Charles F. Emerson,
Co. G, 15th Maine Infantry Regiment, USA.
The only Union veteran buried among Confederate
soldiers in Evergreen Cemetery in
Chester, South Carolina.

Every year on the morning of the Fourth of July, I preform a solemn and important duty that I've continued for half my life. I travel into my hometown of Chester, South Carolina and visit the city's Elmwood Cemetery and arrive at the Confederate soldiers' section near the back of the cemetery.

Four rows of small, white granite markers stand as quiet testament of the town's role in the last year of the War Between the States (1861-1865) as an important railroad depot. The bodies of dead Confederate soldiers were unloaded from hospital trains and buried here in the final months of the War.

With the exception of three of the graves, all of them are marked simply with the words: Unknown Soldier CSA.

As a member of the Sons of Confederate Veterans and a resident Guardian, my volunteer duty is to check on and help maintain the graves of these men. These duties include cleaning the headstones at least once a year and ensuring that the graves are honored properly on certain occasions.

As always, on the Fourth of July, I arrive to place a new Confederate battle flag, or South Carolina State Flag, at the base of the grave monument in front of the section, usually replacing an old, faded one.

I walk among the grave stones, taking the time to check them over and determine the next time to clean them, or brush off bird droppings -- and then I come to the last row and one grave in particular.

Unlike the other men and boys buried at the site, the young man buried in this plot did not wear the hallowed gray and butternut of the Confederate citizen soldier, but rather the dark blue of the Union army that fought against these men during that terrible conflict.

Like all the others, I check the large and beautifully carved old granite headstone over, then I kneel down and replace an old, faded U.S. Flag with a newer one -- the only grave in the section that flies the Stars and Stripes.

Private Charles F. Emerson of the 15th Maine Infantry Regiment USA is not the only former Union soldier buried in the cemetery, but he is the only one buried in a section reserved for his former enemies, far from the State of his birth.

The story of how he came to be here is very interesting and it begins in the first year of the American Civil War.

The Confederate graves section of Evergreen Cemetery in Chester, South Carolina.
Private Emerson's gravestone is the only one decorated with a 35-Star U.S. Flag every year on
Confederate Memorial Day (May 10th) by members of the local United Daughters of the Confederacy
(UDC). His grave is located third from the left in the back row and the tallest and oldest headstone.

The 15th Maine Infantry Regiment was organized in Augusta, Maine in December of 1861 and its members mustered into Union service on Thursday, January 23, 1862, originally for a three-year enlistment. Nearly all of the regiment's members came from Kennebec County in the southern part of the state. Its commander throughout the war was Colonel Issac Dyer.

Charles Emerson of Pittstone, Maine, then only just turned 15 years old, joined Company G of the regiment alongside his twin brother, George F. Emerson. Both brothers served in the regiment throughout its various campaigns during the War Between The States.

The regiment was attached to Union Major General Benjamin F. Butler's New Orleans Expeditionary Corps from January to March 1862. Then later served in the  Department of the Gulf and District of West Florida in 1862 and during the Red River Campaign in the Trans-Mississippi theater and fought at the Battle of Sabine Crossroads (Mansfield) on Friday, April 8, 1864. Three months later the regiment served in the Eastern theater during the Battle of Fort Stevens on July 11-12, 1864, and then in the Army of the Shenandoah in April 1865. The 15th Maine served on provost duty during the Grand Review of the Armies in Washington, D.C. on May 23 - 24, 1865.

By the end of the war, the 15th Maine lost 348 men (including 3 officers) in the course of the War -- only 5 actually killed by combat-related deaths with the rest lost due to disease and illness.

Following the war's end, the 15th Maine was assigned to occupation duty in South Carolina and assigned to duty in the areas of Chester, Union, Lancaster, York, Cherokee, and Spartanburg Counties in the upstate area. The 15th Maine would serve here for a year before the regiment was formally discharged and mustered out of service on Thursday, July 5, 1866.

It was during this year of Southern occupation duty that Company G would have one final death.

Private Charles F. Emerson, who served four years in the War, died in Chester County on Wednesday, March 14, 1866. He was only 19 years old. The cause of death is listed in local historical records simply as "lung fever" (possibly pneumonia).

He was buried in a plot in Chester's Evergreen Cemetery where dozens of Confederate soldiers were buried by his brother, George, and comrades of the 15th Maine. The only Federal soldier buried on site and, at the time, the only Civil War soldier buried with a proper granite headstone.

The reason for this was that the Confederate soldiers, most of them having been wounded and died in transit on train and unloaded at the local train depot a mile from the cemetery at the time, were hastily buried in the plot and given wooden headboards. These wooden headboards were later maliciously used by occupying Union soldiers for firewood, or simply left to rot.

Because of a fire at the Chester City Hall around the turn of the century, the records identifying these men and boys in gray were lost to history. Later small stone markers listen simply with "C.S.A." were set to identify the locations of the graves.

Aside from Private Emerson, only one 86 year-old Confederate Veteran -- Private William Greene Parker, Co. G, Cobb's Legion Georgia Volunteers, who died in 1911 and asked to be buried with his former comrades -- had a proper headstone for a long time.

Private Charles F. Emerson and his twin brother, George F. Emerson, are listed on the roll of volunteers
who served in Co. G, 15th Maine Infantry Regiment USA. Emerson's death in 1866 is listed as "Died In
Service" the last member of the company to die before the unit was disbanded.
Images courtesy of the Maine State Archives

In 1994, after a couple of years of work, members of the Walker-Gaston Camp #86 Sons of Confederate Veterans (SCV) along with the local Boy Scouts Troop, installed proper U.S. government issued headstones for the Confederate veterans buried at the cemetery, replacing the former small stone markers. These new granite stones all bear the words: Unknown Soldier CSA.

Organizations like the Sons of Confederate Veterans continue to search for information in State archives to identify the rest of the soldiers in the Confederate section of Evergreen Cemetery to this day. To date only one of these veterans has been positively identified and a proper stone laid by the SCV in 2003.

Private Charles F. Emerson is buried in the upper left row of gravestones, his century-and-a-half marker is the tallest of the 56 graves in the section, and the only one marked with a U.S. Flag on Federal holidays and Confederate Memorial Day (May 10th in South Carolina).

His headstone reads:

In Memory Of
CHARLES F. EMERSON
of Pittstone, Maine.
A member of Co. G. 15th Maine
Vet. Vols. Who after service of
more than four years in
the United States Army Died at
Chester, SC. March 14th, 1866.
Aged 19 years 7 months
----
Comrade sleep thy work is done
Hope we lay thee down to rest
All thy days of toil are gone
And they art now forever blest.

A small U.S. government issued marker was also added by the Sons of Confederate Veterans to the grave of Private Emerson in front of his headstone in 1994. This marker has a Christian cross and is inscribed:

Charles F. Emerson
Pvt. Co. G 15 Maine Inf.
Civil War
Nov. 23, 1846    Mar. 14, 1866

A more modern granite marker honoring Private Emerson was
placed on site by the Walker-Gaston Camp #86 Sons of
Confederate Veterans (SCV) in 1994.
Note the 36-Star U.S. Flag -- the Union flag in 1866 at the time
of Private Emerson's death.

In doing research for this article, I wanted to discover if I could find the grave of Private Emerson's twin brother, George, who survived the war and returned to their home state of Maine.

What I found was quite interesting.

Private George F. Emerson is buried under a monument in Whitefield Cemetery in the town of Whitefield, Lincoln County, Maine. He died in 1897, aged 51 years.

On his monument is also included the name of his twin, which reads:

CHAS. F. EMERSON
Born A.D. 1846
Died at Chester
S.C. A.D. 1865

The grave of Private George F. Emerson,
twin brother of Charles F. Emerson, in
Whitefield Cemetery, Whitefield, Maine.
Photo courtesy of Find-A-Grave.com.

A family connection between hundreds of miles and two men buried in two different American States, but still remembered together in stone.

Every year on U.S. Memorial Day and the Fourth of July Chester County's resident Yankee soldier, Private Charles Emerson, receives a new U.S. flag.

Though he was a member of an invading Federal army that fought against my own Confederate ancestors, he is also a young man buried far from the place he was born and barely had time to grow up in. Anyone who had a family member who went away to war and never came home cannot help but feel for that.

More so, he was an American veteran in my eyes and deserves to be honored no less than the other Southern veterans he was buried with. Respecting his grave yearly with the flag of the country he fought for is no chore for me.

Lest We Forget.


A special thanks to the following for the information contained in this article:
The Chester County (SC) Historical Society, the Maine State Archives online, and Find-A-Grave.com.
Other sources include: The Story of the Maine Fifteenth by Henry H. Shorey (1890) Pages 217-218.
All photographs in the article were taken by the author, except where noted.