The strange burial of four soldiers;
was an eternal message intended?
By HUDSON OLD
Journal Publisher
The mists of the legend of graves facing the wrong way launched Laura Lewis's cyber-space search for four mysterious men buried here in the waning years of the Civil War.
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"Generations of my family carved headstones in Pittsburg and they liked puzzling over the tale of the 'Catholic Yankees,'" said Laura, a Metroplex dweller who works daily in cyber-space, providing customer support for an Internet service provider. "I grew up hearing different versions of the same story."
There is a written record - four names and four dates chiseled in native stone, boulders of dressed iron ore rock, according to the dates, cut at the height of the Civil War, 1863.
Though the soldiers of the Plantation South had stunned the nation winning epic battles, the resolve of Union troops was unshaken. The tenacious Northern grip was tightening to a strangle hold and the bitterness of the war deepened with the passing of the final days of the Confederacy.
Iron ore, Laura points out, isn't the most enduring of headstones, but whoever chiseled names and years into the rocks cut deep. Whether intended to honor or disdain can't be said, only that it was work meant to remain.
Three of the men died in 1863. The fourth lived another two years, presumably here, and was laid to rest at the southern end of the neat line of their graves at Rose Hill Cemetery.
"In one version, they're said to have been Union Soldiers who died in Daingerfield," Laura said. "It's said the people in Daingerfield refused to bury them."
For whatever reasons of his own, Samuel P. Aldredge is said to have brought the bodies to Pittsburg for burial, putting them in a family plot not far from his son. Arriving in Pittsburg in the early 1850's, Mr. Aldredge began what became Rose Hill cemetery when he buried his 4-year-old son on the family's farm in 1857.
Later, he deeded seven acres to the Masons as a community cemetery. Ownership has since transferred to the city of Pittsburg. The cemetery lies on the southeast corner of U.S. 271 and Texas Highway 11.
In another version, the four were Union soldiers traveling through Pittsburg when they died. Either tale begs the question of how young men died, coincidentally, if not in the same moment, in the same year. As for the fourth - why would an enemy soldier remain only to die two years later?
"And then there's the Catholic part," said Laura, whose Warrick and Stansell family association with Pittsburg Monument spanned three generations. An educated guess could consider the deeper division of denominational differences in 19th century America.
"Most of the pioneers in Camp County were Protestant," Laura said. At any rate, the stones reflect spiritual standing - each is inscribed with a cross. The names read: "SN Bell, Doct JS Deane and AH Bell." Each died in 1863, followed by "J Dickson" in 1865.
Given the Union association of the men in the tale, she began researching with the assumption the four could have been prisoners at Camp Ford, near Tyler. Finding no matches, she began searching Union records, again finding no matches.
Intrigued by the "Doct" ascribed to JS Deane, when Laura broadened her search she focused on and found him in on-line records of the National Archives at Fort Worth.
"The first surprise was that he was a Southerner," she said. In August, 1861 he enlisted in Marion County, Arkansas and was assigned to Powers Infantry as an assistant surgeon.
Told another way, two other records would support versions of his story in which he becomes a hero. Finding that he was "relieved of duty" as a surgeon in May of 1862 - two months later he turned up as an infantry lieutenant.
"He was captured twice," Laura said, "and both times he was paroled." September 19, 1862 he was taken prisoner at Iuka, Mississippi; within two weeks he was in battle at Corinth, then at Hatchie. He moved on to the epic siege of Vicksburg, where on July 4, 1863, the Confederate port fell and Union Forces at last had divided the South, taking full control of the Mississippi River. Dr. Deane found himself a prisoner again.
Puzzle pieces began fitting when she found records of "John Dixon." Not an exact match for the name on the stone in Pittsburg - J Dickson, but a soldier with a war record running parallel to Dr. Deane's. Both men were at Corinth. Both were taken prisoner at Vicksburg.
"I thought it was interesting that I found a record where John Dixon had been wounded," Laura said. "He was in a Confederate hospital for three weeks between January and February, 1863."
Interestingly, the two spellings - Dixon and Dickson - could be attributed to the fact that John Dixon was illiterate. Laura's got a copy of the record that proves it. The day on which the Confederacy formally surrendered at Vicksburg, John Dixon marked beneath his name on parole papers with an "x."
"It was the standard practice for anyone who couldn't sign his name," Laura said. "Someone recorded the name and the person verified it by marking an x."
The war records of both men end with the surrender at Vicksburg in the seventh month of 1863.
"Within five months, then, Dr. Deane was dead and buried in Pittsburg, between two men named Bell who died in the same year," Laura said.
Did both of those men come from Vicksburg, too? Were they already here? Did they join Dr. Deane and "J Dickson" somewhere along the way.
Whatever that answer, the mystery of why the position of head and foot stones indicates that the men were buried facing the west both remains and fits with local lore.
"I've wondered if they were just men sick of war," Laura said.
They were called "Jayhawkers," she said, men tired of the fighting who fled into the swamps of Louisiana, and better yet, the piney woods of East Texas, one of the few places in the South that was untouched by the ravages of war.
"I found a letter written by Captain M.L. Lyons of 'Headquarters, Paroled Prisoners,'" Laura said. "He was writing about large numbers of prisoners from Vicksburg and Port Hudson who had 'gone inside the Jayhawker lines.' He reported that it would take 200 well-armed troops to subdue the deserters."
In her mind, there's another possible link between the doctor and J Dickson.
"If Dickson is the same Dixon who was hospitalized in Mississippi, had he fully recovered before being taken prisoner at Vicksburg?" Laura asks. "Did Dr. Deane stay with him to help take care of him?"
Finally, she was curious about the man said to have buried them.
"Samuel Pierce Aldredge had some education," she said. "He was appointed as the first treasurer of Camp County." Census records put him in Pittsburg in 1853. An 1860 census of slave holders says he owned 17 slaves. He had two sons who served in the Confederacy.