By Mark Wineka
mwineka@salisburypost.com
With a tuna sub and soft drink, I settled onto a bench near the back gate to the Salisbury National Cemetery.
It was a pleasant spot. The bench sat within eight crape myrtles planted in a U-shape.
Through a high, wrought-iron fence, I could see damp wash hanging stiff on a clothesline behind a neighboring public housing unit.
I also heard the thump-thump of a bass speaker from another home.
To the west, a freight train rambled by, sounding its whistle at every crossing.
On the way to my lunchtime perch, I walked past monuments, the section devoted to unknown Union soldiers who died at the Salisbury Confederate Prison and row after row of white headstones making their geometric patterns across the land.
The simplicity of the markers intrigued me as always. Most don’t even include a hometown or state, which is fine, because I reasoned that veterans have fought for all of us.
I could see Bob Ledbetter’s grave from the bench. He had been a master sergeant in the U.S. Army, serving in World War II and Korea, and had lived just shy of 80 years.
His headstone had a two-word note at the bottom: “Beloved Taters.”
And that’s all the information it gave me.
Ledbetter’s wife, Irene, died almost 10 years after him in 2008. She is buried here, too, probably on top of Bob, and her headstone inscription is on the other side of the marker.
A large white hose snaked up the hill from a fire hydrant on an adjacent street and went into the oldest part of the cemetery surrounded by a granite wall.
I assumed the hose was for irrigation connected to all the workers and machinery I had passed on my walk in.
The usual park-like quiet of the downtown National Cemetery has been disrupted since May by a total turf and headstone renovation.
Grass around most of the headstones is being removed and replaced by rolls of new sod. The headstones which have sunk are being raised and cleaned so the impressive lines of markers are as level as possible.
“It definitely needed some work,” Gregory Whitney, the cemetery director, told me recently. “It will be an improvement.”
The cemetery renovations are part of something called the Millennium Project, which is costing more than $1 million in Salisbury, Whitney said.
When the general contractor is finished at the cemetery site off Railroad Street, it will continue renovation work across town at the Salisbury National Cemetery annex next to the Hefner VA Medical Center.
More than 3,000 veterans and their family members have been buried in the annex since 2000, and it represents the only open national cemetery for first-time burials in North Carolina.
The Salisbury annex, which is seeing some 500 burials a year, has enough room for casket and cremation remains through 2030, Whitney said.
Some day, the number of white headstones at the Salisbury National Cemetery annex will far outnumber the original site, and maybe people who live here will think of the 11.8-acre downtown cemetery as secondary.
I’ll never do that.
Here, in cornfield trenches, the emaciated bodies of thousands of Union soldiers were piled after they died in the terrible conditions of the Salisbury Confederate Prison.
When Union Gen. George Stoneman and his troops arrived in Salisbury, they torched the prison, and Stoneman ordered that a wooden fence be erected around the graves.
A granite wall eventually replaced the fence. The federal government purchased the first parcel of land in 1870 and by 1873 had erected the tall U.S. monument of white granite. The monument side facing the trenches says, “They died that their country might live.”
Maine (1908) and Pennsylvania (1910) monuments followed because of the significant number of federal soldiers from those states who had perished at the prison.
The 25-foot-high Maine monument says, “They fought for peace/for peace they fell/They sleep in peace/ and all is well.”
The Pennsylvania monument rivals those on the Gettysburg battlefield. It’s an arcade with arched entrances and a domed roof, topped by an 8-foot figure of a Union prisoner of war.
The National Cemetery became, of course, a burial place for veterans of all the wars that followed.
My lunch finished, I walked along the granite wall, moving from shade pool to shade pool under the trees that have become monuments themselves.
A couple of kids still on summer vacation cut through the cemetery on their way home from Lincoln Park Pool. Otherwise, I was by myself except for the workers.
I swung by the Rowan County Veterans Memorial. Later, near the entrance, I stopped to read the tablet containing all the words to President Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address.
It had been a noisy lunch at the National Cemetery. The neighbor’s music. The freight train. The turf renovation. I barely heard the AMVETS carillon play the musical bells associated with 2 o’clock.
But I never visit this cemetery without hearing a spirit ó a spirit whispering that this is hallowed ground.