Remembering Hetty Jones on Memorial Day

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There are two memorial services in Roxborough on Memorial Day. The big one is at Gorgas Park by the war monument, and it'll have a good-sized turnout. But Marianne and I like to go to the earlier one, only a few blocks distant, at Leverington Cemetery. There, the number of vets actively participating in the ceremony is roughly equal to the number of civilians, family mostly, attending. 

The thing about Leverington Cemetery is that it contains the graves of Americans who served in all the major wars this country has fought. The bodies of soldiers who died in the Civil War were shipped home from other states. But the eighteen Revolutionary War soldiers buried there died only a short walk away when Hessian troopers set fire to the barn they had been sheltering in and shot them as they tried to escape.

So, between that and the fact that the vets at the service are neighbors who deserve what little support we can offer, that's the service we go to.

And in what has become a small tradition in our family, Marianne cut roses from our back yard and left them on the graves of two who were never American soldiers: One was Choban Hoxha, known locally as Pretzel Pete, who had spent time in a Nazi concentration camp before being taken for slave labor by the camp's Soviet liberators, but managed to escape and make his way to America.

The other was Hetty Jones. 

Miss Jones was the daughter of a prominent Baptist minister and had a comfortable life when the Civil War broke out. She did volunteer work on behalf of the Northern soldiers. But when her brother, a Union officer, died in action, she decided she was not doing enough, and volunteered as a nurse, first at Filbert Street United States Army General Hospital in Philadelphia, and then at Ulysses S. Grant's headquarters in Virginia, where the suffering was greater. Her service, it is recorded, was tireless. In 1864, she worked hard preparing Thanksgiving dinner for the soldiers there, and shortly thereafter came down with one of those diseases endemic to military hospitals at that time. She recovered enough to resume partial duties, but it did not last. She died, aged 56.

At Hetty Jones' funeral, her casket was carried by convalescing soldiers who knew her from the Filbert Street Hospital.She is buried beside the graves of her father and brother.