Sweet Auburn: The Magazine of the Friends of Mount Auburn Mount Auburn and The Civil War | Page 22

Did you know...?
By Mount Auburn Volunteers
Buried at Mount Auburn are:
• 893 Civil War veterans. An additional 55 Civil War
veterans are buried elsewhere but are memorialized at
the Cemetery.
• Three Medal of Honor recipients from the Civil War.
• Two Confederate Army veterans, including one whose
service is noted on his headstone.
• Two members of the Secret Six, radical abolitionists who
funded John Brown’s raid on Harper’s Ferry, Virginia:
Samuel Gridley Howe (1801–1876, Lot 4987 Spruce
Avenue) and George Luther Stearns (1809–1867, Lot
1454 Sedge Path). A third co-conspirator, clergyman and
author Thomas Wentworth Higginson (1823–1911), is
buried nearby at Cambridge Cemetery.
• Julia Ward Howe (1819–
1910, Lot 4987 Spruce
Avenue), who wrote
“The Battle Hymn of the
Republic” after visiting
Union troops near Wash-
ington, D.C., in
November 1861.
• James and Mary McKinnon
Tate, who married in 1858
and went to war together.
Mary served as an Army
Nurse and died in 1863
at Douglas Hospital in Washington, D.C.; James died
shortly after the war in 1865. They are interred side-by-
side in unmarked graves in the St. Matthews Lot.
20 | Sweet Auburn
• Artist Winslow Homer (1836–1910, Lot 563 Lily Path),
whose sketches of Civil War camp and battle scenes
appeared in the popular Harper’s Weekly magazine.
• Boston candy-maker William F. Schrafft (1846–1928,
Lot 7385 Halcyon Avenue), who popularized the jelly
bean and urged civilians to send the non-perishable
candy to Union troops serving in the Civil War.
• Two of Paul Revere’s grandsons who perished in the war
(Lot 286 Walnut Avenue). Edward Revere (1827–1862)
was killed in action at Antietam; Paul Joseph Revere
(1832–1863) died of wounds received at Gettysburg.
• Twenty-seven members of the Banks Brigade Bee, who
gathered to make shirts, socks, quilts, nightclothes, and
bandages for Union troops. The Bee also supported the
work of Dorothea Dix (1802–1887, Lot 4731 Spruce
Avenue) and Emily Elizabeth Parsons (1824–1880, Lot
608 Greenbrier Path) at the Western Sanitary Commission.