ANTIGO — James Fonder was in the Mattoon Historical Society one day a little over a year ago when a 14 year old boy named Noah Rickert walked in.
Fonder, vice president of the society at the time, was studying a topic he had become obsessed with recently: local civil war veterans.
Rickert, he found out, had a connection to them.
“He found out he had a great, great, great, great grandpa that served in the Civil War. Then he found out he had a great, great, great, great uncle who did too. He was shocked,” Fonder said.
This was not as shocking to Fonder, however. At Woodlawn Cemetery in Mattoon, he had recently discovered 21 different gravestones belonging to Civil War veterans. Using whatever he could find — obituaries, census, pension, internet records — he pieced together a catalog of their lives.
The details of many of these biographies are spare — others cause double-takes. According to the catalog, he found that a man named Rennick Knowles was captured along with his brother Henry during the Battle of Chickamauga in Georgia — he only survived because, unlike Henry, he was not sent to the notorious Confederate prisoner-of-war camp known as Andersonville. Moses Johnson was part of a unit known to conduct guerilla warfare in Louisiana. Louis Welch was present at the trial and execution of Lincoln’s assassins.
Fonder had been toying with another related idea for some time, and being there with Rickert solidified it for him: he would organize a walking Civil War reenactment for the Mattoon Memorial Day parade. He already had many of the uniforms — he’d bought them at a discount on Ebay. Finding volunteers to wear them wasn’t hard.
“I knew a couple of their parents,” Fonder said. “They said, ‘Well I have a son that might be interested.’ Well this boy came and he was my union officer. I picked him out when they were coming to try the uniform on. His little brother was real sad — he wanted to be in there too. As he got out of the car, I said, ‘Well, I got my drummer boy.’”
It continued on like this, until, because of the background of some of the volunteers, Fonder had to broaden the group’s scope, which eventually even enhanced his own historical knowledge.
“Pretty soon another woman said, ‘I have two girls that are really interested in trying.’ I had my Florence Nightingales. One of the girls, she said, ‘What’s a florence nightingale?’” Fonder laughed. “But a little Native American boy joined, and I found out all these Native Americans from Menomonie, Stockbridge served during the Civil War. Nobody really knows about it. And this little boy is representing all the Native Americans that served in the Civil War. Then I guess his sister said, ‘Can I be in it?’ She’s wearing her native costume. She’s representing the 14 Wisconsin Native American women who served during the First World War and went to France and served as nurses.”
There was a boy dressed as Ulysses S. Grant, another as Theodore Roosevelt. There were adult women who, Fonder said, represented mothers whose sons died in war. Several little girls were pilots.
“One dressed like Amelia Earhart and the other like WASPS — Women’s Airforce Service Pilots,” he said. “They were civilians — they would deliver planes overseas to the pilots and just fly them over — and they never got any recognition until 2009. But those girls were tickled to death when they found out they were going to be pilots.”
On parade day, Fonder’s reenactors were a hit, he said.
“People couldn’t get over how good they looked,” he said. “The drummer boy, he didn’t know how to play the drums, but he was making the motions, and everybody thought he could play the drums. All of a sudden someone goes, ‘Oh, look at the drummer boy! Listen to him play!’ He got so excited and pretended to play so hard that they flew out of his hands.”
After the short walk through Mattoon last May on the hallowed day, Fonder’s group kept going, all the way to the Woodlawn Cemetery, where they paid their respects to the men that the day was really all about.
With them was a 90-year-old, Reuben Eckhart. According to Fonder, Eckhart, a former history teacher at Mattoon, had originally given him the idea to honor fallen veterans just as he had in the town’s Memorial Day parade.
Eckhart had been horrified by some of the details he’d read about America’s wars. As a first year teacher in 1955, he’d even assigned high school students to read about that aforementioned confederate prison through the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel “Andersonville” for extra credit, wanting it to hit home in their minds as it had in his just how hellish even footnotes in wars can be.
“When I was teaching the Korean War, I told about the incident where I was out visiting my aunt and uncle’s gravestone and over on the north side of the cemetery are these eight young people that were killed because they were serving. They were nothing more than just common Joe’s,” Eckhart said.
Monday on Memorial Day, the reenactors will march in the Mattoon parade for the second year in a row. Fonder, adjutant at John Owen American Legion Post 287 in Mattoon, is hoping the small tribute draws attention to the local departed veterans whom, before his work, most had ceased to remember.
“Memorial Day is a time to remember, not to forget those that died overseas,” Fonder said. “I think that’s great to remember all the history here. By keeping the records, by doing this, after I’m gone, in the future, they might find out something more.”
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