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Fairview ceremony marks Civil War dead

Grand Army event returns for first time since 1940

With flags unfurled and fluttering in a steady breeze atop Fairview Cemetery, an Altoona monument was once again the center of a Memorial Day service honoring Blair County’s Civil War dead.

The Grand Army of the Republic ceremony that was held at the Soldiers & Sailors Monument and Burial Circle at Fairview Cemetery each year between 1868 and 1940 returned this Memorial Day, also marking 150 years since the 26-foot-tall monument was erected at the center of a circle of graves of men who died in the Civil War.

What was once Decoration Day is now Memorial Day, and the parades and monuments serve as “a symbolic connection between the living and the dead,” Blair County Historical Society President Jared Frederick said to the crowd at the monument Monday afternoon.

It was the veterans with their Grand Army of the Republic posts and their Sons of Union Veterans of the Civil War camps who carried on the solemn GAR ceremony each Memorial Day, marching from the post’s hall on the 900 block of Chestnut Avenue to the cemetery, until World War II interrupted life as it was and the camps and posts disbanded, noted John Crider, a member of the Col. James E. Crowther Camp No. 89 Sons of Union Veterans and also a member of the Fairview Circle Restoration Project.

At one time, there were 900 members of the GAR in Altoona, Crider said.

As they got older, the tradition of marching remained even as an appeal to the mayor was put out to provide transportation for the aging members, Crider said. That appeal was met by an angry letter from the members, who wrote their own letter to the mayor.

“They stated they would march on foot, and those too infirm to march would be pushed up the hill in their wheelchairs,” Crider said from the podium flanked by two wooden cannons that once guarded the entrance to the GAR hall.

The GAR ceremony is a solemn one and “no empty show or useless parade,” Crowther Camp Commander Charles J. Campbell Jr. pointed out at the service, which includes placing of flowers and wreaths to remember the Union dead.

Monday’s gathering was by no means the end of the Fairview Circle Restoration Project, as work still remains to be done, explained group member Sharon McClellan. There are 17 men who died in the Civil War, either in battle or by disease, buried in the inner circle and last year, 13 of those headstones were replaced. Additionally, 46 Civil War veterans who survived the war are buried in the outer circle, along with 14 men who served in later wars. The group is replacing 29 of those 46 headstones this year, and if money is available, landscaping will be done to make the circle look as it did in the early 20th Century.

McClellan noted there are 72 names on the monument, although an estimated 500 men from Blair County died during the war. Of the 17 buried at the cemetery, two remain unknown.

“We are still searching for those two missing names,” she said.

Mirror Staff Writer Greg Bock is at 946-7458.

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