Gravestone of Private John M. Cohler, Company A, 47th Pennsylvania Volunteers, Easton Cemtery, Easton, Pennsylvania, June 2024 (used with the permission of Julian Burley).

From eastern Maine down to Southern California and Florida’s Dry Tortugas up through Seattle, Washington, the men who served with the 47th Pennsylvania Volunteer Infantry are being reunited again—this time in death, thanks to a “virtual cemetery” that has recently undergone a significant expansion.

Established in 2014, the Virtual Cemetery Project of 47th Pennsylvania Volunteers: One Civil War Regiment’s Story has been fueled by the energy of more than a dozen volunteers, who have trekked through cemeteries coast to coast over the years, in good weather and bad, to find and photograph the final resting places of, and monuments erected to, the 47th Pennsylvania Volunteers who fought to preserve America’s Union during the American Civil War.

What those Virtual Cemetery Project volunteers have created is an astonishing treasure trove of vital statistics, combined with thought-provoking imagery illustrating the stirring patriotism of average Americans and the heartbreaking cost of disunion and war.

A Milestone Reached

By the time that the first rocket illuminates the night sky on the Fourth of July in 2024, the 47th Pennsylvania Volunteers’ Virtual Cemetery will have grown to include memorials honoring more than fourteen hundred members of the regiment, including:

• John Boulton Young, a thirteen-year-old drummer boy who was the first member of the regiment to die;
• Professor Thomas Coates, the “Father of Band Music in America” who became the first conductor of the 47th Pennsylvania’s renowned regimental band;
• Fuller Family members who were Mayflower descendants and prominent, nineteenth-century civic leaders and industrialists;
• Inventors Daniel Reeder and Abraham N. Wolf;
• John Peter Shindel Gobin, the regiment’s final commanding officer who later became the seventh lieutenant governor of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania;
• Franz Schwentzer, a leading, nineteenth-century Frakturist, wood carver and furniture maker; and
• “Dead-Eye Dick,” one of the regiment’s “mystery men.”

Supporters of the project hope that the grave of every member of the 47th Pennsylvania Volunteer Infantry will eventually be located and properly marked, and that a biographical sketch will be written and posted for each soldier.

To learn more, visit the Resting Places and Memorials section of the 47th Pennsylvania Volunteers’ website.