GAR

Civil War history is interesting, but people tend to think it does not touch the Kansas prairie. Kansas was frontier during the war, only recently being populated by the white settlers.

But the new and frontier states did contribute troops to the effort. My great great grandfather came from a little town in north central Kansas called Blue Rapids. I visited Blue Rapids in March of 2005 and stopped in to the cemetery. Many of the graves were marked with these star shaped markers, which have GAR on them.

GAR stands for Grand Army of the Republic. During the war, there were various armies, and they were usually named after the geographical region they came from. During the grand review that took place at the close of the war, the first gathering of the Union soldiers took place in Washington D.C. and then the whole organization was disbanded and the war was over. I thought this is where the concept for the Grand Army of the Republic came from, a description of all that served. There was the eastern army of Grant and the western army of Sherman, each given a full day to pass in review.

However, in 1866 a fraternal organization was put together that was called the Grand Army of the Republic. These Civil War veterans designated the precursor to Memorial Day, called Remembrance Day, in order to make sure that those served were properly remembered.

So today when you visit old cemeteries, you sometimes see these markers, placed on the graves of the soldiers over the next 70 years as the veterans of the war died off. Blue Rapids is a particularly good example of a cemetery with a lot of GAR markers. You can tell they are very old. They look like they are made of iron and painted black, and a few have bent or fallen over. I would guess the cemetery has 300 to 400 graves in it and maybe 40 of these markers.

My great great grandfather grew up there and left his mother and father on the farm to join and serve in Sherman's army. He participated in the march to the sea, the famous (or infamous, if you are from the south) overland sweep of the union forces from Atlanta to Savannah. After the war he came back and settled down, and many veterans moved west and settled on the Kansas Prairie. So many in fact, that the towns and counties of Kansas are mostly named after Civil War heroes like Sherman, Grant, Sedgwick, and McPherson, to name a few. These "immigrants" for after the war are probably the bulk of the people buried in the cemetery (rather than people that were there before the war like my family).

This isn't where my great great grandfather is buried. He ended up in Manhattan Kansas, some 40 miles to the south of Blue Rapids. My mother studied genealogy and found the graves in the Sunset Cemetery, just across the street from the fraternity house that many of the men in the family joined in college. George and his wife Mary Cheney purchased a plot and are buried beside each other. My mother discovered that the plot had spaces for 3 more graves that were never used. She was able to transfer the title and now my father and her are buried alongside our veteran ancestor. There is no GAR star marking his grave. I wonder if you can still get them?