How a group of RI students helped ensure Civil War veterans weren't forgotten this Memorial Day

PROVIDENCE – The task awaiting two dozen eighth-graders from Nathaniel Greene Middle School seemed like a scavenger hunt: Finding the Civil War veterans buried amidst thousands of graves in St. Patrick's Cemetery.

But before they planted flags next to those veterans' headstones, The Rev. Ken Postle wanted to make sure the students knew why they were there on a hot Friday afternoon before the long Memorial Day weekend.

"It’s not so much about how many flags you put down," he said. "I want you to understand what these guys did for you."

The right thing to do

In the weeks leading up to Memorial Day, veterans' groups and historical cemetery volunteers try to make sure every veteran's grave in the state is marked with an American flag. But it had been years since anyone got to St. Patrick's, which sits next to the Chad Brown housing projects in an overlooked section of Providence.

So Postle, the cemetery coordinator for the Blackstone Valley Historical Society and a prominent advocate for preserving historic gravesites, was thrilled when Kelly Domenico told him that she wanted to get her students from Nathaniel Greene involved.

As the group of predominantly Black and Hispanic students looked on, Postle explained how freedom wasn't always guaranteed, especially for those with certain skin colors. That's what the Civil War was all about, he said.

"Were all these guys who went down there and died for us good guys?" he asked. "Were any of them bullies in school? I don't know. But it doesn’t matter what they were like. They knew that was the right thing to do."

Who were Rhode Island's Civil War veterans?

Many of the Civil War veterans buried at St. Patrick's were immigrants who fled Ireland during the famine, he pointed out. Upon arriving in America, they faced discrimination when they tried to get a job or find a place to live.

Postle had the students plant the first flag at the grave of John McKenna, who was captured as a prisoner of war and died in Georgia's notoriously brutal Andersonville Prison at the age of 24.

More: T.F. Green, Dunkin' and the DMV: The strangest places to find historical cemeteries in RI

"He left famine, he died at Andersonville," Postle said. "When we come to a place like this, we want to remember and honor those guys."

Keeping the tradition alive

Joseph Faiola, commander of Rhode Island's chapter of the Sons of Union Veterans of the Civil War, had come prepared with hundreds of flags handed out by the Rhode Island Veterans Memorial Cemetery.

The volunteers who carry out the arduous task of "flagging" veterans' graves each year are getting older, he and Postle agreed, so recruiting a new generation will be key to keep the tradition alive.

Through his volunteer work caring for historic cemeteries throughout the Blackstone Valley and beyond, Postle has also come across far too many gravestones broken or damaged by vandals.

By bringing students and scout troops to clean up cemeteries and plant flags, he wants to teach them to treat those spaces with respect.

"If you only have a little stone with a little inscription on it, that’s all that somebody knows about you," he told the students from Nathaniel Greene. "You guys live around here, right? If you see people coming in here, knocking stuff over, say ‘What are you doing?’ That’s the only piece of the story that they have left."

This article originally appeared on The Providence Journal: Civil War veterans from Rhode Island honored by Nathaniel Greene students