While we enjoy the cookouts and ballgames associated today with Memorial Day, we pause to remember the soldiers of the 17th and all before and since who gave all. Here’s a photo of the members of the Buckingham Post No. 12 in Norwalk, Connecticut taken after decorating the graves of their deceased comrades at St. Paul’s Church. This is the resting place of Lt.Colonel Albert Wilcoxson, who was mortally wounded in Florida in 1865. This photo is from the 28th Anniversary Roster (their last one), published in 1908.
From an address given by Reverend W.C. Richardson to the post during an 1890 Memorial Day observance:
“I see a mighty host, shadowy and trim with silent tread and ghostly march. Away it streams in ceaseless majesty, rising and falling with stately swing, its phantom banners waving in the noiseless breeze, its muskets touched with the light of another world.”
Members of the South Norwalk Buckingham Post of the G.A.R. gather in the cemetery of St. Paul’s Church c.1908