A Sad Duty to Perform

On his second day of freedom, former slave John Washington wrote of the side-by-side burial of seven Union soldiers in Falmouth’s Union Church Cemetery on April 19, 1862. He recalled a solemn funeral in which dismounted cavalry stood in lines around seven newly dug graves in an old family burying ground that held the remains of some of Falmouth’s oldest and wealthiest early settlers, with tombstones bearing birthplaces in England, Scotland, Wales, and Ireland. Amid old tombs, vaults, noble cedars, a chaplain’s prayer, the hymn “Windham,” and the band of the Harris Light Cavalry playing “Pleyal’s Hymn,” the seven coffins were lowered and the company departed in grief, some swearing to avenge the dead. The burial followed a skirmish in the early morning hours of April 18, 1862, during the first Union advance on Falmouth. The dead were escorted by an honor guard from the 1st Pennsylvania Cavalry and the 2nd New York Cavalry, also known as the Harris Light. Those buried were Patrick Devlin of Company M, 1st Cavalry; Thomas Norton of Company M, 1st Pennsylvania Cavalry; Lieutenant James Nelson Decker of Company D, 2nd New York Cavalry; John Heslin of Company L, 2nd New York Cavalry; Josiah Kiff of Company H, 2nd New York Cavalry; John Murphy of Company G, 2nd New York Cavalry; and George Weller of Company H, 2nd New York Cavalry.

Falmouth, Virginia · United States