Pam

This subject of Union soldiers buried at Helena Ar. has been discussed several time on this board and I was hoping someone else might step forward with more helpful information, unfortunately as far as I know no one has ever been entirely successful in locating such graves.

The general determination has been that all the Union Veterans that were know where moved to the Memphis National Military Cemetery after the war during that program of relocating all the Union veterans remains to these cemeteries.

Unfortunately as the story goes the contractor wrote the names of the veterans from Helena, who could be identified during that process, on their wooden caskets with chalk. These caskets were loaded onto the open deck of the steamboat which was carring them to Memphis. During that trip upstream a thunderstorm washed all these names off their caskets.

Hence, almost all of the Union veterans from Helena, were reburied in the memphis cemetery as "Unknown".