Last Saturday (August 31), as Hubby and I were trying to decide what to do with our day, he made a suggestion that surprised me. He wanted to visit Fort Snelling National Cemetery. His grandparents are buried there and he’d never been to see their graves.
The weather was gorgeous, so the visit was pleasant.
Upon arriving, I was struck with how very many white stones there are, all lined up with military precision from whichever angle I looked.
Erik had looked up the location of his grandparents’ graves in the National Cemetery Association’s Nationwide Gravesite Locator. He had a section and numbers for the graves, but even so, when we saw all the stones in the section, we were overwhelmed with the feeling that it was going to take a while to find them.
After making our way to the right section and wandering around for a few minutes, examining the stones, we realized they all had numbers on the back. These corresponded to the numbers in the gravesite locator, with the graves being in numerical order. Leave it to the military to have figured out such an elegant solution!
Within a few minutes, we found the graves for Alfred and Helga Warner.
Alfred died in 1956, long before Erik was born, so he never knew him. Though the details on the gravestone are sparse, they revealed a number of things I didn’t know, like that he was a musician in the U.S. Navy during World War I. I vaguely knew that he served in the Navy, but a musician? In World War I? (I thought maybe he’d been in World War II, like my grandpa.) I asked Erik what instrument he had played. He had no idea, so that’s an interesting mystery to solve.
Helga’s stone shared even less information about her, giving only her birth and death dates and repeating her husband’s name and military info.
As a historian, it has always bothered me how women in the past were defined by their association with their husbands, rather than as individuals with lives of their own.
As we looked around the cemetery, the sea of white stones that appeared to be identical when looked at en masse revealed their differences when looked at individually.
The stones themselves were different from one another, revealing white marble that had been quarried from different areas.
Some of the inscriptions were deeply carved; others were shallower or darker.
Some stones had inscriptions on the back, often for infants or children.
Some children had their own stones.
Later stones provided more life details outside the military, including for the wives. “Beloved Father and Papa,” “Beloved Wife Mother Grandma.”
All the stones we saw had crosses at the top. When I mentioned this to Young Son, who served in the Navy, he said this symbol changes for the person’s religious denomination. That makes sense.
Reading gravestone inscriptions, with their names, dates, and other brief details always makes me curious about the people interred in the cemetery. What were their lives like?
As we were leaving, questions about the history of Fort Snelling National Cemetery filled my head. With the name, it suggested it was associated with Fort Snelling, an early Minnesota outpost on the frontier, with all of its history. Were people from the Fort buried here?
A quick look online revealed some of the history of the cemetery from the Minnesota Historical Society. It isn’t the original cemetery for the Fort, but the people from previous Fort Snelling cemeteries (there were more than one) were moved to Fort Snelling National Cemetery. The Fort Snelling National Cemetery was the collaborative effort of several military organizations, with army veteran Theresa Ericksen “instrumental in the effort.” It was dedicated on July 14, 1939. There are over 180,000 service members buried in the cemetery, which covers 436 acres.
No wonder we were overwhelmed! The experience was awe-inspiring in a peaceful way.