A team of veterans and family members gather at Bellevue Cemetery to place flags on the graves of veterans. Standing from left: Lorin Johnson, Dennis Lyddy, Nelson Northern, Steve Cronin, and Diane Cronin. Kneeling: Nancy Cronin (left) and Paula Johnston. (Photos by Tom Aciukewicz)
Harvard’s Veterans’ Services agent, Dennis Lyddy, has been serving the nearly 300 veterans in Harvard dutifully since his appointment in 2007. Most people know that he is the go-to person for veterans in need of assistance with obtaining VA benefits for everything from financial aid and housing to health care and education. But what you may not know is that he is duty-bound to ensure that the final resting places of Harvard’s veterans are well cared for and are treated with honor, especially on Memorial Day, when Mass. General Laws Chapter 115, Section 9 directs that the graves are to be marked with U.S. flags. Lyddy says this has been a challenge since before his appointment. The problem, he says, is that not all veterans’ resting places have been identified.
Lyddy says he has been working on a project to identify and catalogue veterans’ graves since 2008, picking up with the Cemetery Commission where a project started in 2005 left off. That project, the senior class project of Bromfield alum Patricia Cronin, started the task of accurately mapping veterans’ gravesites in the Center Cemetery.
Much progress has been made on the project, according to Lyddy. When he became involved, there were 82 veterans’ graves identified in the Center Cemetery. Now, he says, 154 veterans are known to be interred there, and 151 of those gravesites have been located. Research continues to locate the remaining three graves. And the scope of the project has moved beyond the Center Cemetery. To date, Lyddy says, he and others working on the project have identified 421 veterans interred in Harvard cemeteries, including one each in Still River center and the so-called smallpox grave on Poor Farm Road. Bellevue Cemetery is the resting place of most of Harvard’s veterans—a total of 243.
In cataloguing the gravesites, Lyddy and project volunteers record the full name of each veteran, the branch of the armed forces in which he or she served, and the era in which that person served. “There are some extraordinary people buried here,” he said, including Daniel Johnson, the 29-year-old chaplain of the Revolutionary War’s Continental Army, who died of illness on the way to Fort Ticonderoga. Johnson is buried in the Center Cemetery.
Lorin Johnson finishes fixing a flag holder at Bellevue Cemetery on May 21.
In keeping with the mandate in M.G.L. Ch. 115, §9, Lyddy has also been working on placing and repairing flag holders and markers at some of the graves, working closely with the Historical and Cemetery commissions and the Department of Public Works as necessary. His goal is to photograph veterans’ gravesites with flag holders in place, as part of the effort to catalogue and document the graves. (He says that anyone aware of a veteran’s grave that has no flag holder should contact him.) In the course of this part of the project, Lyddy discovered that there are Revolutionary and Civil War veterans interred in the Shaker Cemetery. Since traditional Shaker beliefs value the community over the individual, Lyddy plans to seek funds from the Community Preservation Commission to install one memorial stone and flag at that cemetery. He has a goal of dedicating those during the Memorial Day services in 2012.
Lyddy, who works part-time in his Veterans’ Services capacity, dedicates a significant amount of his own time to this effort. Asked why he does it, he says, “To honor those who served our country [and have now passed on]. If we can’t take care of those, how can we take care of the living?”
