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Civic Education’s Lasting Value: Students Mark a Revolutionary War Veteran’s Grave

Civic Education’s Lasting Value:
Students Mark a Revolutionary War Veteran’s Grave

By Paul LaRue, America 250 Ohio, K-12 Education Co-Chair

If you ask one hundred people, each of the one hundred would say that civic education is a good thing. However, if you asked the same one hundred people, “What does civic education look like?” be prepared for a variety of answers.

More than twenty years ago, my students at Washington Court House High School began a civic education project marking the unmarked graves of veterans with headstones from the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs. The graves of the veterans were either unmarked or their headstones had been destroyed. The idea for this project began while I was giving my students a tour of our local cemetery. I was showing a section in our cemetery with several unmarked graves of veterans when a student asked, “Don’t these men deserve better?”

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I was instantly struck by the wisdom in this question. We began to educate ourselves about the policies of the U.S Department of Veterans Affairs on marking the graves of veterans, and we also started learning about our local cemetery. Eventually we partnered with both the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs and the local cemetery. Our guiding principle was “Every Veteran Should Have a Marked Grave.” It was our honor to do this work. For the next decade my classes worked in local cemeteries in rural southern Ohio marking the unmarked graves of veterans.
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In 2005 we began working in the nearby Bloomingburg Cemetery. My students discovered the grave of a Revolutionary War veteran whose headstone had been destroyed. Prior to this discovery, the graves of veterans we had marked were primarily Black Civil War veterans. My students used resources like a map of the cemetery from the Works Progress Administration, and developed a system to calculate the location of an unmarked grave by using the position of existing headstones. My students researched, ordered, and installed a headstone from the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs for Revolutionary War veteran John Klever.

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The U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs sent a film crew to document my students work for a segment for their news magazine The American Veteran. Over the course of a decade, my students researched, ordered, and installed more than seventy headstones in six cemeteries, primarily in rural southern Ohio. We honored the graves of veterans from the American Revolution through World War I.

Twenty years have passed since my students’ headstone project in Bloomingburg. We are now commemorating America 250. Civic engagement projects, like marking the unmarked graves of veterans, demonstrates the lasting value of engaging students with their communities. This segment shows my students in action. It was our honor to mark the graves of these forgotten heroes.