Cumberland, Md. ? When his wife of 40 years died in 1875, Charles Ohr expressed his love for her with a costly coffin, fitted with a glass viewing window, and an elaborate tombstone. Then he surrounded her grave with a protective wrought-iron fence.

They had lived through the Civil War in Cumberland, in western Maryland, where he was a physician appointed to treat the thousands of wounded soldiers who filled the makeshift hospitals in the town’s churches and schools. Mary Blackwell Ohr and other women of the town of 8,000 also cared for the soldiers, bringing them into their homes to recuperate or delivering meals to the hospitals.

Ten years after the war, Ohr laid his dead wife to rest in her family’s cemetery in Hancock, about 40 miles to the east.

In April, someone dug up her grave, shoveling out the heavy, brown clay and heaving it over the three-foot-tall iron fence into several piles.

The cemetery is within the Chesapeake & Ohio Canal National Historical Park, and park rangers are investigating the crime.