With an Earnest Desire to Preserve the Peace of a Graveyard--Workshop Essay

On November 19th, 1890, Horatio N. Beach published in his newspaper, the Brockport Republic, a circular announcing the beginning stages of the establishment of the Brockport Rural Cemetery:

With an earnest desire to establish in Brockport a cemetery that will honor it; with an earnest desire to obtain in a Brockport cemetery a lot for myself and lineal kindred that shall have an assured guarantee of perpetual care, I have been prompted to take an active part in the enterprise of establishing a new cemetery here.

By November 5th the following year, seventeen people had been interred in the little cemetery, and according to the newspaper, "the remains of the first soldier buried there were those of Michael Englehof." Around this time a movement for the construction of a soldiers monument was under way. Similar interest for such a monument had been noted in the past, but for various reasons the idea was never fully realized. It wasn't until the spring of 1891, when the Brockport Rural Cemetery Association gave a site for the purpose--"generally conceded to be one of the finest in the State"--that the plans for a memorial to honor the sacrifices of American soldiers started to come together.

A 1954 photocopied photograph acts as a cover page for "A Debt to Michael," a term paper written by James Belmont Johnson, a student at the State University College at Brockport, sometime in the year 1964. The photo shows the dark presence of a stone tower and some distant trees against a bright sky barely smudged by cloud. The tower doesn’t just stand in the open field, it possesses it, claims the space so that it may be seen for miles. It seems complete. Fifty-seven years later, the line of trees has caught up, and surpassed, the medina sandstone column. Ten or twelve feet have crumbled from the top, making the Brockport Soldiers Memorial Tower easy to miss, unless you know where to look.

What I had been looking for was something other than asphalt to ride my bike on. I needed dirt, wet or dry, lumped with rocks and logs and exposed roots. The ragged path that peeks through the brush along the east side of Owens Road near the train tracks can be a hassle to spot if you don't remember exactly where it is, but I figured it might have just what I needed.

Many times now have I plunged into those woods at the point halfway between the railroad tracks and a weathered plywood sign urging passer-by to donate money to "Save the Brockport Tower." Over the beaten grass and between grasping thorn bushes, I crank closer to the little clearing where the tower seems to step out from behind the trees. It still reaches into the sky as if nobody's told it that it was slowly falling apart. In the serenity of the forest, everything that the memorial could need saving from, even time, is forgotten.

Included in the book Images of America: Around Brockport by William G. Andrews, is a rendering of the tower that most closely matches how it looked at the time of its dedication on September 1st, 1893, which, Andrews writes, was "one of the grandest ceremonies in the town's history." The cylinder of stone ballooned into a sturdy looking battlement near the top, and visitors could climb a winding iron staircase all the way up where the eye was treated to a three-hundred-sixty degree view of beautiful countryside. Being so close to the train track, the tower became a scenic attraction along the route of the New York Central Railroad. Passenger trains would make a brief stop during their journey to allow people to get out and admire the stoic memorial.

And stoic the memorial remains, despite its situation: a monument built as a reminder of the past has become a ruin that each incoming generation of Brockport will know less and less about. It's there to be discovered by any adventurous youth, much to the distress of parents. "I'd be careful climbing around that thing," a young geo-cacher once told my friend and I out in those woods, "My dad says it's bound to come down any day now." Yet the odd visitor to the decaying tower may still aspire to reach its peak. The staircase is almost unrecognizable, having rusted away to a single, busted shaft, leaning against the inside wall. Needless to say, getting to the top would be too difficult for anyone but an experienced mountain climber. Moments have been scratched into the rock, scrawlings such as "Ben was here!" or "Mike + Ally 4ever," but a few names are up out of reach, marking progress towards the hole into the sky. If not for a panoramic view of a historic canal-side town, the arduous ascent would be worth it to get away from the ground where broken glass and an aluminum can or two lay as evidence of some misguided get-together. Suppose the monument did come tumbling down: no longer could it be used for all the wrong reasons, and, if it happened at just the right moment, a pair of young lovers could get their wish under a pile of rubble.

Michael Englehof is still buried out there, along with William Castleman, both soldiers who didn’t have family to move their remains to a better cemetery when the people who had guaranteed the “perpetual care” Horatio Beach specified in his original address faded away like the veterans they were meant to honor. Unlike people, history has a way of burying itself as more and more events take place in time. People like Jacquelyn Morris, a card carrying village historian at the Emily L. Knapp Museum and Library on State Street, along with friends Rayleen Bucklin and Dan Burns, take it upon themselves to excavate the past as it becomes distant, even though the slow process of organizing the information and artifacts they’ve collected make it hard to keep up with the ever-developing saga of Brockport.

“Don’t we owe him something?” James Belmont Johnson asks in his term paper, referring to the long dead soldier Michael Englehof. Like many other past attempts, Johnson’s urge to repair and preserve the Soldiers Memorial Tower didn’t garner the interest necessary to restore it to its former glory. As a member of this latest generation to come across the monstrous relic, to dig through its history, to relish the peace and quiet of the forest in which it stands, I find myself not particularly wanting to see it as it once was, but defended as it is now. Respect may still be shown to the memorial and the heroes it represents. Time will continue to ravage the proud tower, whether we want it to or not, but hopefully the layers of dust that our moments with it leave behind aren’t enough to bring it down anytime soon.