Plaques to honor revolutionary vets

County resident and veteran Jim Thompson recently decided that one group of veterans wasn’t getting the recognition they deserved and he wanted to do something about it. He has been working on a project since last fall, with the help of the county commissioners.

Thompson is vice president of the Ebenezar Zane chapter of the Ohio Society of the Sons of the American Revolution. Thompson was able to speak at a recent commissioner’s meeting where he explained what he was doing on behalf of revolutionary war soldiers. “One of the first projects of the society [when founded] was identifying all the revolutionary war soliders that were buried in Eastern Ohio. This resulted in about 12 volumes of books that covered, I think, twelve counties, including three in West Virginia.”

The booksare out of print now but have been upgraded to CDs and now Thompson is working on getting the information put online so it’s more accessible.

“The biggest problem with the revolutionary war soldiers’ graves is being able to find them,” Thompson said. “Fortunately, that was done for us earlier. There are 98 soldiers buried in Harrison County; 56 of those are in maintained cemeteries. That leaves the other 42 spread out all over the county. Some are in family plots, some are marked, some are not. Some have been lost to the ages whenever strip mining came through, destroying a lot of the old cemetaries… some were never marked. We had two veterans who were killed by Native Americans; one near New Athens and one near Germano and a neighbor just buried them where they lay. We just know the relative location of where they are.”

Thompson approached commissioners last fall with a project to identify those 98 veterans throughout the county. “When the veterans service office was formed in the 80s, the commissioners put a line number in their budget according to the Ohio Revised Code, making them responsible for marking veterans’ graves throughout the county. That line is still present to this day and it’s used to this day. I came to ask them if something like this [project] would fall under that. It was unanimous approval,” Thompson explained.

Now Thompson wanted to show commissioners what their help accomplished over the winter months – plaques with information and QR codes that will be put up around the county, giving information to residents and visitors about the veterans in the area.

“We had to get aluminum, we had to get labels, and provide these posts,” Thompson said. “The commissioners provided $4,000 and I’m happy to say I’ve only had to spend about $1,400 of that money so far. I was able to get 22 of these posts done and the labels as we do it. Currently, we have four cemeteries in Harrison County done and online.”

Thompson hopes that in the next few weeks they will be able to start putting the plaques up around the county. The plaques were a collaborative effort that included the students of the Harrison County Vocational School as well as local business Mizer Printing.

All the information on veterans can be found on ebenezerzane.com and by scanning the QR code once the plaques are up.