100 years ago: Lawrence children honor forgotten soldier’s grave

From the Lawrence Daily Journal-World for May 30, 1911:

“Of the scores of tributes Lawrence paid its honored dead today, none were so full of pathos as a simple ceremony round a deserted grass strewn grave in an abandoned burial place two miles from town. Round this forgotten grave, with reverent hands and faces alight with patriotic devotion, thirty little boys and girls silently and tenderly heaped a wild profusion of flowers. The story of this lonesome grave, half concealed by tangled underbrush in a deserted burial place long since fallen into a mouldering state of ruin and decay, is a pathetic one. It marks the resting place of a courageous soldier, one who did his simple duty unshirkingly. But during the years in which a grateful country has heaped gorgeous floral tributes on the final resting places of its heroes, this lonely mound has not known the touch of a single blossom, unless it was one which a pitying wind gently wafted to its unkempt grassy surface. The grave was accidentally discovered this spring during a hiking trip of a younger generation of soldiers — the Lutheran Boy Scouts. On its weather-beaten, worm-devoured headboard could be discerned indistinctly the name of Lewis L. Hughes, First Regiment of Kansas Volunteers. Shocked at the unkempt, dilapidated surroundings, the boys embedded the only flag they carried in the lonely grave, and spent a half day energetically clearing a space around the spot. Before leaving the old burial place they agreed to revisit on Memorial Day bearing the flowers it had so long been denied. This morning they kept this faith. Promptly at 8 o’clock thirty boys and girls of the Lutheran Sunday school marched out of Lawrence to the abandoned cemetery. They carried flags and wreaths, and tonight that grave will nestle under a protective blanket of intermingled flags and roses.”