How many American cemeteries can claim to have a Crimean War veteran?
Well, York’s Prospect Hill Cemetery does.
Doctor Henry L. Smyser, who graduated from the University of Pennsylvania, worked as a Surgeon Major in the Crimean War, and a decade later assigned to a military hospital in York.
It being a warm-ish October Sunday, I drove over to the cemetery to walk around. I hadn’t been over to Prospect Hill in several months, maybe since the spring.
In the older part of the cemetery, on the hill that overlooks downtown York and Codorus Creek, there’s a Civil War walking tour that takes one to graves of soldiers and other connected to the Civil War on both the Union and Confederate sides. There an unknown soldiers on both sides, as well as the businessmen who surrendered York to the Confederate army in 1863.
I’ve never really done the walking tour, in part because the signs were old, badly faded, and nigh unreadable. Still, I would look at them in my own aimless meanderings through the cemetery, and sometimes I would look for for the graves marked on the signage.
What I found today was that a local Eagle Scout candidate, for his Eagle Scout project, had all of the signs redone.
I did not look for William Buel Franklin, the man who lost the battle of Fredericksburg for the Union Army in 1863.
This is cool, and now that the signs are redone and readable, maybe at some point I will more thoroughly explore the Civil War heritage of York.