Suzanne Stewart
Staff Writer
There is a field in Bartow, that lies next to St. Mark the Evangelist Mission Catholic Church. To the passersby, it looks like just another field, but below the surface, it holds a rich history dating back to the Civil War.
The field is owned by descendants of the Matheny family – Robin Madron and Roger Davis – who recall tales of there being a Civil War cemetery in the field.
Madron remembers the field having stones in it that marked the final resting place of soldiers. She also remembers playing in a now demolished barn that had bullet holes and carvings in the walls made by soldiers who were patients in the makeshift hospital.
Madron reached out to local historian Bob Sheets to share the stories and Sheets put together a team to survey the land and see just what they could find below the surface.
Last week, Sheets was joined by professor Dr. Stephen McBride, archaeologist George Crothers and Tim Henry as they went over the field with a magnetometer and ground penetrating radar.
The magnetometer was used to survey the entire field, while the ground penetrating radar was used on a smaller section which was fenced off years ago by Jessie Brown Beard Powell. Powell believed that portion of the field was used as a cemetery for Union soldiers.
Crothers said the magnetometer detects metal and differences in the soil types, which can help narrow down where the graves are.
“It measures variations in the magnetic field,” he said. “Soil changes, ditches, graves, things like that. They won’t always show up well, but it can give you an idea.”
The magnetometer was faster and it only took a day to do the entire field. Crothers explained that ground penetrating radar takes longer to collect data so that is why it was only used on a portion of the field.
“This sends radar waves into the ground – it’s the same kind of radar waves they use for planes,” he said. “It’s designed to penetrate the ground in the amplitude, the frequency it works in and then, like regular radar, it bounces off whatever’s in the ground.”
The data collected doesn’t show up like it is portrayed on TV or in movies – with obvious outlines of bodies and skeletons. In fact, it can’t detect bone at all unless it is extremely close to it.
Historian and author Hunter Lesser has extensively researched the area, especially with regard to the Civil War, so they know for sure the field was the site of a skirmish and the barn that was on the land was used by both Union and Confederate soldiers as a hospital.
So, it’s not a question of are there graves, but more a question of how many graves are there.
It can be deduced that at least some of the soldiers buried on the property are from the 2nd Arkansas, whose commander was Allegheny Johnson.
“[Johnson] had this company referred to as Tulip’s Rifles and they were from Arkansas,” Sheets said. “They held up the advance because they had the high ground here. They were firing muskets and rifles at the Union troops.”
The Confederates set up canons along the Staunton-Parkersburg Turnpike, aiming back at the field, to counter the Union advance.
The soldiers were using exploding shot, designed to explode overtop the troops and rain shrapnel down. A lot of those ordinances did not do what they were intended to do, and locals now have unexploded ordinances in their homes that they found in fields in the area.
“It’s all over the place,” Sheets said.
While the survey will help to roughly determine how many graves there are, it won’t be able to tell who exactly was there and what led to their demise. It can be assumed many of them were casualties of battle, but some may have died from disease.
Once all the data is collected, Crothers will write up a report and share it with Sheets, who will then use it to create more information about the area. Sheets said he has already contacted the Civil War Trails organization which helps make interpretive signs for sites of significance.
“They will do a road sign down at the entrance and then have a sign or two up here near the church,” Sheets said.
The signs will give a history of the battle that took place there, the discovery of the cemetery, as well as the oral history of the barn being used by both sides as a hospital.
