Sweet Auburn: The Magazine of the Friends of Mount Auburn Mount Auburn and The Civil War | Page 7

unwavering courage. Conservation will stabilize the stone
and help to preserve the carved details and the moving
inscription on the monument.
I can hardly realize that there will come a day when I will go
home for good and hang my sword up on the wall and draw it
no more. I expect when the time comes, that it will be terribly
hard for me to leave the old flag, that I have fought under so
long.
— Francis Welch Crowninshield in a letter
to his mother, Caroline Crowninshield, March 1865,
Phillips Library, Peabody Essex Museum
The inscriptions and carvings on gravestones are clues to the
humanity of those who have gone before us. Recognizing and
preserving them, no matter how much time has passed, reminds
us we are all traveling together on similar journeys.
— Jane Goodrich
Dorothea Lynde Dix (1802–1887),
Lot 4731 Spruce Avenue
Superintendent of Nurses for the Union Army
Dorothea Dix was a social reformer whose devotion to the
welfare of the mentally ill led to widespread reforms. Only
a week after the attack on Fort Sumter, Dix, at age 59,
volunteered to form an Army Nursing Corps. As Super-
intendent of Nurses for the Union Army, Dix organized
hundreds of women volunteers into a functioning corps,
established and inspected hospitals, and raised money for
medical supplies. Under her leadership, Army nursing care
was greatly improved. Dix’s simple granite monument,
which is a frequent stop on guided and self-guided tours, is
inscribed with only her name. As a result of the 2013 proj-
ect, her monument is now protected from potential damage
by mowers and trimmers with an elegant groundcover that
draws attention to her headstone and her history.
As Superintendent of Union Army Nurses, Dix was the first
woman with executive level governmental authority in American
history. Thanks to Dix, three thousand women served as paid
nurses, integrating the male-dominated health care field.
—Denise Pappas, Council of Visitors member and author
of John Simmons, The Measure of a Man.
Frank Howard Nelson (1843–1862),
Lot 1825 Eglantine Path
Lieutenant, 19th Regiment, New York Infantry
Frank Howard Nelson was the son of Henry
Wells Nelson, a wealthy Boston merchant and
investor. Like many other young men from
Boston’s most prominent families, he was eager
to serve the Union and he enlisted in the army
at the age of nineteen. The inscription on his
family’s sandstone cenotaph (above, right) tells
that he fell at the Battle of Williamsburg, after
receiving his fourth wound. Lieutenant Nel-
son is memorialized with a cenotaph because
he is not interred at Mount Auburn but was
most likely buried in an unmarked grave near
Williamsburg, where he fell. Only a small per-
centage of soldiers were transported back to
the North for burial as embalming techniques
were still very new and the fee for embalming
and transportation of remains was high. While
conducting research on the life of Frank Howard Nelson
to share with visitors on Civil War tours, Mount Auburn
Volunteer Steve Pinkerton discovered a second cenotaph
(below, right) erected in memory of Lieutenant Nelson in a
different family lot, which was not noted in Mount Auburn’s
records. Pinkerton also found a poem written in memory
of Nelson by Lydia Howard Sigourney, a poet and Nelson
relative. The poem begins, “Oh beautiful and brave!/ The
highly nurtured, and the nobly bred,/ Who took the crown
of manhood’s majesty/Upon thy youthful brow, – we mourn
for thee/ So early fled.” Conservation will include cleaning,
leveling the monument on its foundation, re-adhering flak-
ing and delaminating sandstone, filling cracks, and patching
some losses.
Donors to Mount Auburn’s Civil War Monument
Conservation Projects:
Edith S. & David L. Engel
Jane L. Goodrich
Virginia B. Harlan
Barbara Brydon Hills
Claudia and Peter Kinder Charitable Fund
James B. & Laura P. Lloyd
in memory of Mary Phinney von Olnhausen
Elizabeth Hills O’Leary
Massachusetts Civil War Sesquicentennial Commission
Mildred Cambridge Memorial Fund
Whitney Hills Mitchell 
Harold I. Pratt
Charles E. Rosenberg & Drew Gilpin Faust
Alan J. & Patricia C. Shapiro
Matthew R. Walter & Patricia Capone
The Ruth & Henry Walter Fund
Oliver Wolcott, Jr.
Winter 2015 | 5