A Brand New Series from Bellefonte.com
By Serge Bielanko
Down just about every road in these parts, I feel them. Like the ghosts of long-dead whitetails lurking just off the edge of another country road, I know they are there. I scrape up against the loose gravel shoulder of another farm lane cutting back through some beautiful lost valley, a modern landscape ready to explode upon this world in all of its 19th-century spring glory, and I sense the soldiers. Long gone, but very much still here. The Boys in Blue, they called them once. Long ago. The Federals. Union Men. Billy Yank.
Civil War soldiers came from many different backgrounds. Young, old, rich, poor; some died a month after they left home to fight, shot through the heart or withering away in a cramped hospital bed. Others? They lived many, many moons after the war. Heck, they probably lived in houses that still stand on your block. I’ll bet you a Sheetz coffee that local Civil War veterans likely stood in some of the same places where you ended up standing today.
“It’s strangely beautiful, I think, the essence of these men who experienced something so rare and horrible and riveting and life-altering”
– Serge Bielanko
It’s strangely beautiful, I think, the essence of these men who experienced something so rare and horrible and riveting and life-altering. They linger down every road, lane, street, and path around this county. Most folks don’t know it though. Or else they don’t really care too much at all. Local lads, their moldy bones mostly turned to dust by now; their names only mentioned on rare occasions.
Or sort of never at all.
I want to get to know them. I really want you to want that too. So here’s what I aim to do. I’m going to start this new Bellefonte.com series ‘Them Centre County Boys’. Every couple of weeks or so, I am going to pick a local Civil War soldier with Centre County ties and I want to bring him back to life, for just a few minutes, in my own way. With words. I want to raise the dead with the words that I write. And I want you to come along with me.
It’s a good deal, I’m telling you. I’ll do all the work. I’ll do all the research. I’ll dig through the dusty books and records, and dive around in Ancestry.com. It’ll be me who drags my kids to the local graveyards to verify information. And I’ll do it all just so I can piece it together for you to read, okay? This whole project is a dream come true for me. Civil War soldiers in my backyard, calling my name. Long gone local boys calling YOUR name in the foggy morning, begging us to come listen to their voices.
“Every couple of weeks or so, I am going to pick a local Civil War soldier with Centre County ties and I want to bring him back to life, for just a few minutes, in my own way”
– Serge Bielanko
It makes me shiver. It gives me super real goosebumps. I’m a nerd, I guess. But so be it.
I want local Civil War soldier history to be contagious.
I want you to take an ice cream cone out to the cemetery some evening and just sit there beside his grave, pondering the meaning of life and the military service of a local Veteran.
Right there in the middle of Millheim, right smack dab in the middle of Snow Shoe or Howard, from Boalsburg all the way up to Orviston: Centre County: where we live and work and play and die: it is scattered with oodles of graveyards. Behind old churches where yellowjacket nests hang from the eaves like desolate towns hooked to the sky: graveyards. Hidden back in the shadows of every dark mountain descending: graveyards. At the edges of farms, all still in the summer sun/ all silent in the falling snow: graveyards. Your kids see them from their school bus seats. Your dogs leak in them and then run after fat groundhogs. They are your ancestors with their mouths sealed by time, these quiet spots, rarely visited. They have stories to tell. Good stories. Tales of bravery and courage for sure, but also less heroic tales. Farm boys lying sick in crowded hot rooms. Young people missing their families, missing Spring Creek, missing autumn hayrides, missing nervous kisses from the shopkeeper’s daughter.
“I want local Civil War soldier history to be contagious”
– Serge Bielanko
Some Spring Mills blacksmith marching through the driving night rain. Hungry and riddled with blisters the size of mouse heads. Just wishing he could run. Back home. Away from all this.
Some Milesburg farmer’s son, tired and weary, fleeing camp while it sleeps in the dead of night, his desire to live stronger than any notion of glory could ever be.
Some young buck Bellefonte kid, lying in the grass, bees buzzing around him on a warm May morning. The sun is shining down. Birds are singing songs of joy. The kid looks at his chest and sees his mortal wound. As the world begins to dim, he hears the sound of a turkey gobbling up the mountainside back home. He smiles that his hearing is still so sharp. He cuts himself a slice of pie. Rhubarb. He pets his dog, He says his younger brother’s name.
Leroy.
Just once.
Then he dies alone, far from everything.
FYI: his grave is over by the field where your kid plays T-ball.
Let me be clear. I’m not going to be doing ghost stories here. I love ghost stories as much as the next person, but that’s not what is about to go down here in this space. Instead, I want to announce to you, proudly, and with a lot of electricity buzzing through my veins, that I’m going to be doing stories of certain people who once lived where we live. Civil War soldiers. Civil War veterans. Civil War dead. Civil War survivors.
Not just white ones either. No way, no how, never. The time is now. I want to try to shine a light on some of the African-American soldiers who fought for this country back then too. There were a lot of them and they deserve it. Their names, or some of them at least, are on the monument out front of the courthouse. We drive by their ghosts all the time, I figure, whenever we cruise through town.
“I want to try to shine a light on some of the African-American soldiers who fought for this country back then too. There were a lot of them and they deserve it”
– Serge Bielanko
Bellefonte slipping by/ the antique malls/ the pizza joints/ the Y/ the massive Victorians. Forgotten soldiers standing there right where Santa Claus sits in his cozy hut in December. Standing there waving at us slowly. They are ghosts, I guess, but these aren’t really ghost stories. It’s time we stop, discover what kind of stories they are.
Civil War history doesn’t have to be all tactics and maps and big-name generals.
There’s so much other stuff. There’s so much marching off to what they believed would be adventure, heading into the unknown fog of war, moving away from the small-town sort of life that most Centre County people lived back then, and it has all the makings of the best tales ever told. The Civil War was a bright and shiny thing at first, promising short work and long triumph for most soldiers. But what followed was a harsh and punishing reality. A succession of days turned to years, the kind of long journey into scattered versions of a similar nightmare that you and I won’t ever be able to truly understand.
But we have to try. We have to imagine.
“They have stories to tell. Good stories. Tales of bravery and courage for sure, but also less heroic tales”
– Serge Bielanko
Civil War soldiers, the same ones whose names we can read on stodgy regimental rosters from back then, often found themselves walking into one trauma after another. Many of them, in fact, MOST of them, were not military people. They had zero experience and very, very little training once they volunteered or were drafted. The boys and men buried in these graveyards right down the road from your home (or your camp or your hotel room here in Centre County), were mostly your normal everyday kind of boring people. Kind of like you and me. Or EXACTLY like you and me.
Yet they were swept up into a relentless storm that changed their lives forever. Or ended it outright. They fought in a war that changed America- and the world- forever. They fought for their nation, a nation that was facing a great reckoning. To end slavery or to let it flourish. These very bodies buried just off the side of the road you shot down on your way to chase trout or coach Little League or meet your Tinder date or visit your Gram, they are the same bodies who once were so full of life and blood and soul and fear and anger and uncertainty. They participated in abysmal days and nights, often dying in the process, for a cause so powerful and important that most of us will never ever come close to walking in their legacy footsteps. But I often wonder how many of them would have rather never gone. Off to war. Off to die. Or off to lose a leg and lose their friends and lose their minds.
“They participated in abysmal days and nights, often dying in the process, for a cause so powerful and important that most of us will never ever come close to walking in their legacy footsteps”
– Serge Bielanko
I don’t know how in the world I am going to do their memories any kind of justice.
But I’m going to have a real go at it.
Rolling my Honda all over the place, out through the cornfields beyond Hublersburg or out past the woods by Potter’s Mills, or even right there in the middle of Bellefonte, I swear to you that I feel stuff. I’m pretty sure it’s these Civil War boys watching me. Waiting on me. Smirking as I shoot by. You know, I’m always in a rush, zipping towards another Sheetz or another school pick-up or another day’s work in another town down the line. But maybe they are waiting for me to help them be heard. Is that weird? Does that sound super creepy?
I don’t know and I don’t care. All over this county: locals, visitors, Penn State people, hot young hipsters with killer vinyl collections and old grizzled heads with garages full of mountain buck racks and cheap cold beer. I daydream of running into someone like you in some summertime graveyard. I want to stumble around a humid corner, peeking around some big slab of grave, and there you are. I see you down on the grass staring at some old soldier’s headstone.
Hopefully, you will look up and somehow get this odd sense that it’s me.
Hey, Boo, look, you’ll say to your better half. I think that might be the Bellefonte website guy that wrote all those soldier stories.
Then we will nod.
Maybe we will smirk at each other a little.
And then I will know that you know.
Do you have any Civil War soldier ancestors with ties to Centre County?A
Maybe you even have their letters or diaries or photos of them?A
Send me an email at sergebielanko@gmail.com if you’d like to have them considered for this series.A
Thanks!
Serge Bielanko is a Centre County writer, husband, and dad.A
Check out more of his writing on Thunder Pie.A
