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Philip Spiess
A LITTLE MEMORIAL DAY REMINISCENCE
In the west front corner of Spring Grove Cemetery in Cincinnati, if you turn left after passing through the railway underpass coming from the front gate, and proceed to the great mausoleum of the John Robinson family (of national circus fame), topped with a trumpet-bearing angel, you will find yourself adjacent to a small grassy triangle, made by the intersection of several roads. On it stands a rather modest monument – in style a sort of cross between the choragic monument of Lysicrates in Athens and the Temple of Diana in Rome – surrounded by a few scattered footstones. It is the McCook Family monument.
Ah, you might ask: who was the family McCook, and why should we know them? The McCooks, a family originating in Belfast, Northern Ireland (many later family members were Presbyterians), had settled in Ohio in 1826. There were two brothers, Daniel and John, who, with their collective 14 sons (“Tribe of Dan” – nine sons; “Tribe of John” – five sons) and another brother and his son, comprised what came to be known as “the Fighting McCooks,” the family reaching prominence as officers, doctors, and chaplains in the Union army and navy during the Civil War, and making it one of the most prolific families in American military history. Six of the McCooks reached the rank of brigadier general or higher, and five McCooks died in action during the war. (Not all of the McCooks, their wives, and children are buried in Spring Grove, however.)
Our story here concerns one of Daniel’s sons and his Civil War regiment: Colonel (later Brigadier General) Robert Latimer McCook, a Cincinnati lawyer of wide practice, who became the commander of a newly organized Cincinnati army unit when President Lincoln and Ohio governor William Dennison called for volunteers in 1861 at the start of the Civil War. This new unit was the 9th Ohio Volunteer Infantry Regiment, a mostly all-German regiment led by an Irishman! This German regiment, “Die Neuner” (mostly Cincinnati Germans, speaking and writing German – the regimental history is in German, and the unit song was the Civil War tune “Marching Through Georgia,” set to regimental words in German), was created when nearly 1,500 men, most of them members of the Cincinnati Turnverein (an international gymnastics club, the first American chapter of which was founded in Cincinnati in 1848), signed up as a single unit, the first German unit to join the Union cause. They trained, drilled, and were inducted into the Union army at Camp Dennison (to the east of Cincinnati); there is an historical marker to them there. The city of Cincinnati gave $250,000 to help organize this unit, which fought in the battles of Rich Mountain and Carnifex Ferry (Virginia – now West Virginia), Mill Springs (Kentucky), and finally took part in the massive campaign of the Battles of Chickamauga and Chattanooga (Georgia and Tennessee). McCook, however, had been killed in Huntsville, Alabama, in August of 1862 in a skirmish with Confederates. (There is a portrait bust monument of Robert McCook in Washington Park, Cincinnati, opposite Music Hall.)
My maternal great-great grandfather, George F. Feid, was a member of this 9th Ohio Volunteer Infantry Regiment (I have his Civil War bayonet), and consequently his daughter, Amelia Feid Foerster, my great-grandmother, with whom I was very close growing up, became a member of a post-Civil War ladies’ association, the Daughters of the 9th Ohio V. I. This organization met at stated intervals at the Hamilton County Memorial Hall next to Music Hall, and I remember, on several occasions as a young child, going to pick up my great-grandmother from these meetings. By that time there were only a few “Daughters” left – the Hoffner sisters, Lena, Julia, and Elizabeth of the great Hoffner “Eagle” Tannery (in Camp Washington) family, as well as my great-grandmother (perhaps there were a few others) – but though quite elderly, they were still an active group.
And this brings me to the nub of my reminiscence: every Memorial Day in my youth (it was still known as Decoration Day to many in those days, as will be seen) duty called, and a patriotic duty had to be performed. So it had been with my grandmother in her youth; so it had been with my mother in her youth; and so it was with my sister Barbara and me in our youth. For us, Memorial Day was no free holiday; it was more like a Sunday. We had to get dressed up in our best clothes (for me it was a suit and tie), despite the hot end-of-May weather, and traipse, with the whole family, down the hill from Clifton to Spring Grove Cemetery. Now I loved Spring Grove Cemetery, but this particular day was a chore. Our destination in Spring Grove was the McCook Family monument and graves on their little triangle of greenery near the waterfall and the lake.
Why? It was Decoration Day, a day to honor the veterans of the Civil War, living and dead alike, and the Daughters of the 9th Ohio made sure we the descendants, old and younglings together, were there to honor the dead. A little color guard of male youths (probably high school age) was drawn up at attention at one point of the triangle, elderly ladies in spring dresses and broad-brimmed straw hats were fanning themselves in the sun-fed heat, and a dark-suited elderly gentleman in a vest with a watch-chain would give a short patriotic address in a feeble sort of intonation; he was followed by someone (usually Lena Hoffner, who had a carrying voice that sounded like a record being played without the needle) reciting Lincoln’s Gettysburg address, and then – ah yes, and then – with a young boy bugler playing “Taps,” we children of the 9th Ohio (and there were others besides my sister and me) would decorate the graves of the fallen, strewing long-stemmed flowers from giant open curved baskets over the graves of the deceased McCooks. Only when this truly Victorian interlude was concluded was the ceremony over and we could retire back home to celebrate the holiday by playing and picnicking like other children. (But first we had to leave an American flag in the ground next to the Feid monument up the hill, commemorating my great-great-grandfather, our family's only Civil War veteran.)
We all sort of celebrated the sesquicentennial of the Civil War some years ago now; the veterans and the “Daughters” are long gone, and the ceremony I described is no more, nor has it been for some time – it vanished with the “Daughters.” The Cincinnati Turnverein (of which my father was a member in his youth), members of which formed the 9th O.V.I., is still in existence as near as I can tell, though the national organization, the Nordamerikanischer Turnerbund, languished, for the obvious reasons, during and following World War I. So, to remember the 9th Ohio and its Turners, I will end this Memorial Day reminiscence with their joint slogan:“Frei und Frisch und Stark und Treu!”
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