Butler county/Hamilton ohio war memorial, and the price of war.

[Waverley_Hills_Hiker]

The small industrial city of Hamilton is home to a rather grand war memorial...the "Solidiers, Sailors, and Pioneers Monument". This monument is a true local landmark given its prominent location downtown, and has even been incorporated into the city seal.



You can go inside where they have a registry, displays from the various wars ,and these nice stained glass windows

Army nurses"


Rolling bandages for the troops:


So far, nothing unexpected for a monument. The unexpected thing is that the interior walls are literally covered with the names of those who served in the civil war mostly. And I mean covered..the interior is in this light polished marble and the names are chilsed into the stone. Every surface has a name. You can imagine that impact of seeing that. Especially since this was a fairly rural county at that time.

It really makes you realize how bloody the Civil War was, and what a sacrifice in lives and time was made..the price of war.

[Philostopher]

1. There are so many older cemeteries in southern Ohio

and I've seen a fair number of them, that tell that same story on a smaller scale. My mother is a genealogist, she started tracing the family line back in the seventies. In the days before the Internet, she used to go find the old cemeteries (family cemeteries, church cemeteries, places that weren't archived well by the county we lived in) and search for names for our ancestors or other people's families she knew. She's seen most of the ones within thirty or forty miles of where I grew up. I don't think she goes on those expeditions anymore -- she's in her seventies and her eyesight isn't as good, so she doesn't like to drive places she's never been, anymore.

I remember going with her sometimes, when I was a teenager, and noticing things like that -- how the concentration of graves of men in their 'vital years' went up around war eras. Mostly, the graves of men who served in the U.S. Armed Forces were marked as such, if only with a seal or the battalion/company number on the stone itself.

It's a different perspective on it all, to meditate on death in that way. Even if I hadn't already had a visceral sense that many wars were wrong in some way -- either wrong-headed, caused by hubris or launched for bogus reasons -- looking at the graves of young men from the relative neighborhood over the course of a couple of centuries would probably have made me skeptical of the wisdom of using violence as a solution. Reading about it in a book is one thing; staring at the gravestones is entirely another, especially when the names are familiar to you because you grew up with those men's ancestors.