Scout’s grave-mapping project honors Civil War veterans
Their gravestones rise in odd angles from the ground and the letters of the soldiers’ names, once cut sharply into the stone, have been smoothed by time and veiled under lichen, but 15-year-old Boy Scout Ian Archer wants to make sure these men are remembered.
With a map in one hand and a fistful of American flags in the other, Archer sought out the gravestones of Civil War soldiers at Maple Grove Cemetery on Saturday morning.
The clover has won out over the grass, and Archer placed the flags aside each grave amid tiny purple flowers. The placing of the flags culminates a year-long project to map each grave’s location. Archer said that after the soldiers gave their lives fighting in the Civil War, they should be remembered.
“It’s important to keep the history alive,” he said.
The map Archer created should make that task an easier one. The laminated 18-by-20 inch map includes photographs of each gravestone, labeled with the soldier’s name and a number corresponding to a location on an aerial photograph of the cemetery grounds. On one side are the Union Civil War soldiers buried at Maple Grove, just north of Highway 24, and on the other are those buried at Pioneer Cemetery on Kansas University’s West Campus.
“It makes it easier for people in the years that come to find the graves,” Archer said.
Archer made the user-friendly map as his Eagle Scout service project, the final requirement for becoming an Eagle Scout, the highest rank attainable in the Boy Scouts. Archer, who has been putting flags on veterans’ graves for several years with his troop, said he had the idea for the project when he and his fellow scouts weren’t able to find all the graves using the old maps.
“We’d always have extra flags,” he said.
Archer mapped the graves with the help of Rod Zinn, a professional land surveyor and former scoutmaster. Zinn, with the assistance of Archer and other scouts, used longitude and latitude coordinates and surveying equipment to verify the location of each gravestone.
Archer said he hopes to be confirmed as an Eagle Scout by the end of June, but that for him, the legacy of the project is about the soldiers. Archer gave the map to the Lawrence branch of the Sons of Union Veterans of the Civil War, which also assisted him with the project.
Archer also donated the map to the research department at Watkins Museum of History, 1047 Massachusetts St., where it is available to the public.
Mike Hadl, Lawrence resident and Sons of the Union member, previously found the soldiers’ gravestones with the aid of a stack of wind-crinkled papers that included a list of the soldiers’ names, a grid of the cemetery grounds and a rough sketch of each grave’s location. Archer’s map, Hadl said, is much easier to use.
“I’ll keep the map forever,” he said.