With time on his hands after retiring from a 21-year career in the Army, John Jackson, a new supervisor at Iola Walmart, found graves at cemeteries in and near his hometown of Chanute fascinating. Mainly, it was graves of Civil War veterans that piqued his curiosity.
“I was looking for something to do,” Jackson said.
He started taking photographs of the veterans’ tombstones and then researched their stories. Today he has catalogued veterans’ graves in 200 cemeteries in 75 Kansas counties.
“I’ve been as far north as Marysville and as far west as Dodge City,” he said.
Jackson outlined his hobby for Iola Rotarians Thursday, and told a few stories from his research.
In one case he discovered a veteran who after the war was a teacher and marshal. His life ended with a bullet during a confrontation with the infamous Dalton gang.
A Chanute veteran was involved in a lottery to determine who would be hanged after being imprisoned by the Confederates. He survived and is buried in a Chanute cemetery.
He told about Virginia Cowden, a nurse who followed her husband into battle with the Ninth Cavalry. She is buried in Iola Cemetery. Cowden is reputed to have been the first white woman to live in Indian territory, then wife of a French trader who came west years before the Civil War. The cavalryman was her second husband.
Others have seized on Jackson’s interest in “Sleeping Heroes,” which is a five-year project of school children in Kansas to commemorate the 150th anniversary of the Civil War. The statewide project was initiated in 2006 by students at Glasco Grade School with a grant from Save Our History.
The Kansas Historical Society became involved and has encouraged students throughout the state to participate. The 150th anniversary of the end of he Civil War will be celebrated in 2015.
The project has “helped kids realize their towns have a lot of history,” Jackson said.
Digging into Civil War history
