At Ease in Forest Hills,
Boston’s Civil War Cemetery
By Pat Tomaino
Gerry Burke — WestRox folk historian and owner emeritus of Doyle’s Café —knows every tree and monument inside Forest Hills Cemetery. (Graciously, he showed us all of them on a recent rainy afternoon.) But he didn’t always feel so welcome inside the gates of Forest Hills. While he was growing up an Irish kid in Jamaica Plain, Gerry says, the grand, leafy cemetery in the neighborhood seemed like a place for Yankees only.
That’s pretty much how this place started in 1848, a rural resting place for Boston’s Protestant elite. Francis Cabot Lowell (of the textile Lowells) is here, along with so many of the old names you can see on facades downtown: Slocum, Forsyth, Warren. Some of the Dearborn family, whose members served President Jefferson and founded Forest Hills, were among the first put to rest here.
Within twenty years, though, the necessity of war made Forest Hills quite a bit more than a gateway to the Yankee hereafter. Burke says that the ground here was prepared just in time to receive many Union officers, like the sons of William and Elizabeth Dwight of Springfield.
Four of the Dwights’ six sons went to war. William and Charles survived the conflict. Wilder was not so lucky; he died at Antietam. His memorial, a giant ivy-covered boulder, gives the words he wrote to comfort his mother as he lay mortally wounded: “All is well with those who have faith.”
Wilder’s brother Howard fell to guerrillas in Louisiana the following year. It says on the same piece of Roxbury puddingstone (seen at the top of this page) that Howard “cheerfully declared himself willing to die for the cause to which his brother had given his life.”
By the 1890s, the great abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison and Richard S. Brown — a Boston community leader, who escaped slavery and fielded three Black regiments for the Union — were also laid to rest at Forest Hills.
It may not have seemed that way to Gerry Burke growing up, but the Civil War had already made Forest Hills a more welcoming place.
He knows it now, lingering in the rain at The Citizen Soldier. This tall monument depicts a Union man with downcast eyes and a somber cape sculpted by Martin Milmore, an Irishman.
It’s a piece of public art in a private place, commissioned by the City of Roxbury to honor her dead officers and soldiers: Boston boys with Yankee names.
Check out our Civil War guide to Beacon Hill and our #CW150 broadcasts on the war’s memory and the dashed hopes of Reconstruction.
