The soldier was just a teenager.
Somewhere in New York state, he had signed up to fight for the Union. The band was playing on the day he marched away from home, headed South to to kill
those rebels. Everyone said it would be a short war. He'd be home in no time. All of that ended on Sept. 17, 1862 at Antietam when he and his comrades were crossing a
farmer's field. A bullet or piece of shrapnel found him. He sagged to the ground and was dead. His buddies moved on; they had to. The fighting was intense.
By the end of the day, the battle considered the bloodiest of the war would end with 23,000 casualties.
The next day, under a flag of truce, a Union burial detail began its grim work. Sometime in the next week, the New Yorker was put in a shallow grave near where
he fell, but away from the the farmer's plow. He was buried near a limestone outcropping that rippled just above the surface. This was temporary. Either
his family or the government would move him to a cemetery and give him a proper burial.
No one ever came for him.
His grave was overlooked when the Union dead were gathered and moved to the new Antietam National Cemetary, dedicated exactly five years after the battle. For 146 seasons, crops were planted all around him and even over him if a farmer could make the tight turn at the rocky place, but nothing disturbed his sleep. He could have been there forever, never found and never known except for a ground hog who happened to build a tunnel at that spot. The tunnel was deep, angling down under the limestone. At some point, the tunnel became clogged with debris and the ground hog vigorously kicked it out of the way, flinging it all the way to the surface.
It included pieces of tea-colored bone.
A visitor who was walking the battlefield in mid-October,strayed off the Corn Field Trail and saw some bones on the ground that he later left at the
visitors' center. He didn't give his name, saying only he had found something in a field off the trail, next to an animal hole.
http://voices.washingtonp...ldier_found_buried_a.html
