Community, honor, remembrance

CORNWALL — Nowhere is the spirit of Memorial Day celebrated with such a sense of community as in Cornwall. It seems nearly everyone comes out to the village Green for the parade and ceremony, and those honored and remembered are familiar names. The day began at the North Cornwall Cemetery, where folks brought flowers to place on the graves of Revolutionary and Civil War soldiers. At the Covered Bridge, a VFW color guard escorted a Navy veteran bearing a wreath of red, white and blue flowers to toss into the Housatonic River, followed by a three-gun salute for the Seaman’s Service.“I didn’t know we had so many fire trucks,” said a woman in the crowd that gathered later on Pine Street as the Cornwall Volunteer Fire Department rolled out its finest and marched in dress uniform.The parade was small but mighty with veterans, Cub Scouts, baseball teams and floats bearing The Little Guild of St. Francis animal shelter workers and, of course, more than a few dogs, and the Cornwall Consolidated School Band. The latter played its way down the parade route and later provided a moving version of “The Star-Spangled Banner” from under a tree on the Green.The theme of community was reflected in the address provided by the Cornwall Historical Society. Member Jeff Jacobson offered a glimpse of this summer’s historical society exhibit on the Civil War, which saw more soldiers die — 755,000 — than in all other wars, combined, in which the U.S. has been involved.There were 1,953 people living here, far from the battlegrounds. Cornwall sent 181 men, nearly 6 percent of its male population. Fifty-one did not return. Among them was Major General John Sedgwick, the highest-ranking Union officer to die in battle. “Although President Lincoln was arranging for the general to be interred at the new national cemetery in Arlington, Va.,” Jacobson said, “Sedgwick’s written request was honored, and he is buried instead in his beloved Cornwall Hollow.”He went on to speak of a resident who was a “copperhead,” a term for a supporter of the Confederacy. In 1861, however, Mark Nickerson enlisted, just after turning 18. Efraim Hermes, a senior at Housatonic Valley Regional High School who will turn 18 soon, read one of Nickerson’s letters home. In order to avoid people and questions, he snuck out of town, hiking through the woods to the train station in Falls Village to catch the noon train to Great Barrington, Mass.In a description of the Battle of Williamsburg, Nickerson described an ambitious colonel who urged his troops forward in an attempt to capture a fort. At daybreak one morning, they fixed bayonets to attack, only to find the fort they’d targeted abandoned by the rebels. “I had a chance to walk over the battlefield while burial parties were burying the dead. About 30 dead men were thrown into a trench. Two or three worn blankets were thrown over them and covered with about two feet of dirt,” Efraim read. “This was my first chance to see what war really meant and I thought to myself, ‘If this is war, then I have seen enough of it.’”The VFW Citizenship Award was presented to Ralph “Dusty” Sandmeyer Jr., who earned the Distinguished Flying Cross, the Bronze Star, Army Commendation Medal and 32 other medals for flying on helicopter missions in Vietnam. Upon returning in 1972, he bought the lumberyard in Cornwall Bridge, where, over the last 40 years, he has routinely hired people just because they needed a job, and served his community in the same spirit that he served his country.The service ended on a sad, but most appropriate note. An honor roll of veterans who died in the past year was read. Sandmeyer raised and lowered the American flag on the Green to half-mast and taps was played. Special memories this year were for Marc Simont, Army, World War II; Frederick Voorhees Bronner, Navy, WWII; Gunther Charles Hepprich, Army Air Corps, WWII; Teryl Joseph Roepcke, Navy, Vietnam War; and Walter Douglas Carlson, Army, WWII.