Rhode Island Veteran To Be Reburied With Full Honors
By Deborah Fitts

PROVIDENCE, R.I. — A veteran of the 2nd Rhode Island Volunteers will be buried for the second time on Saturday, May 31 — but it will be the first burial in which he will receive military honors.

The event, open to the public, will be held in Providence’s sprawling North Burial Ground, just off of Interstate-95. Dozens of reenactors and modern-day military personnel will process through the cemetery and oversee the reburial. At 3 p.m. a concert by the Civil War-era Providence Brigade Band will follow the service.

Bruce Frail, graves registration officer for the Department of Rhode Island Sons of Union Veterans of the Civil War (SUV), said this was the department’s first reburial, and planning has been under way for a year.

The state approached the SUV in November 2006, after the remains of 68 individuals washed out of an embankment along Route 37 in Cranston. Frail said the remains had been laid to rest in the State Institutions Cemetery — catering to the indigent — but during construction of the highway in the 1970s headstones and markers had been removed and graves had been “paved over.”

Archeologists for the Rhode Island Department of Transportation asked the SUV to research whether any of the exposed remains were veterans. The brass nameplates on the coffins provided a starting point, Frail said, and research in state records and the National Archives provided the answers.

Eventually one Civil War veteran was identified, Michael McElroy of the 2nd R.I., Co. D, who served with the regiment in 1864-65. He died in 1888 in the state almshouse.

Frail said the SUV’s mission “is to preserve the memory of the men who fought in the Civil War so what they did is never forgotten.” In the case of McElroy, he added, the veteran would be receiving the “respect” that he likely failed to get upon his death.

Frail said the May 31 event will get under way at 1:30 p.m. with a “transfer service” at the cemetery’s “receiving tomb,” a temporary wintertime holding facility. In this part of the event, which will be private, McElroy’s bones will be taken from a cardboard box supplied by the archeologists and placed in a coffin crafted for the occasion by SUV member Robert Howe. The remains will be placed in a red wool blanket reminiscent of the blankets supplied to the 2nd Rhode Island, Frail said.

Then the procession, open to the public, will march three-tenths of a mile to the cemetery’s GAR burial site, which contains 316 graves. Drums of the Providence Brigade Band will provide the cadence, there will be “multiple color guards,” and the coffin will be borne on a horse-drawn carriage.

More information is available at the SUV website, at http://acwburialproject@tripod.com.