150 years ago this month my town of Brandon, like the rest of the state, was in mourning. A town of 3,000 in the 1860 census, it lost six men in the Wilderness; over the course of the spring others would die at Spotsylvania and Cold Harbor. By the time the war ended 54 men from the town had died. That was typical for Vermont.
It’s easy for us to forget the enormity of it, but that generation never did. Everybody in town knew someone who died in the war; hundreds of people in town loved someone who died in it. Three brothers died from one family, John, Hadley and Charlie Ford – Charlie in the last big action of the war at Petersburg, just eight days before Lee’s surrender. A father and son, Albert and Jasper Fales, died in the war, too; I think Albert witnessed his boy’s death. They were in the same company in the Wilderness. Albert died five months later.
The families never got over it. After the death of her husband George in the Wilderness, Frances Davenport wrote, “I care not to live another day.” But she did, until 1914. After George was finally buried, she told her brother “Oh, you have no idea how relieved I feel to know where he is lying,” - and expressed the wish to “ live near his grave where I could visit it every day and carry flowers.”
Over the years those private flowers turned into public ceremonies, and not just on Memorial Day. The veterans met regularly downtown, upstairs from where the bakery is today. In 1872 they put on a play about the war. Every man in it had been there.
Like other towns all over Vermont, Brandon eventually erected a monument to its war dead, a soldier on parade rest watching over the center of the village. That was in 1886, 25 years after the first soldiers went away. It cost more than the town’s annual budget. 7,000 people showed up for the dedication, twice the population of the town. The monument says “Brandon to her fallen heroes.”
Eventually, veterans began to worry about what it all had meant, and who would remember when they were gone. So Memorial Day ceremonies began to incorporate children. By the turn of the 20th century the programs began to list “school children with flowers” in the parade – and a tradition began of seven year-old girls in white dresses carrying flowers.
In Brandon, that tradition has never been broken. There are grandmothers in town today who once were flower girls. Most of the girls still wear white dresses. This year, Eva Andrews will wear the dress her sister - and her mother – wore before her. Her grandmother made it. Others will wear dresses that Ellen Knapp, our kindergarten teacher has carefully stored in a closet for decades.
The ceremony is beautiful. There is nothing like it. And it’s how Brandon still keeps faith with her fallen heroes.
