Marble angel mourns 3 brothers

“Sleepy Hollow. In this quiet valley, as in the palm of Nature´s hand, we shall sleep well when we have finished our day,” Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote in 1855.

Thus Emerson, plus fellow Concord, Mass., residents Henry David Thoreau, Louisa May Alcott and William Ellery Channing - giants in American intellectual circles and great writers - were all laid to rest on Author´s Ridge, located inside the shaded, curving lanes of this most bucolic, deliberately designed “Rural Cemetery.”

In 1914, the Boston Transcript described Sleepy Hollow as “one of the most romantic burial grounds in America.” Before visitors can contemplate the final resting places of Emerson and his companions, however, they must pass one of the most compelling and enigmatic Civil War memorials found above or below the Mason-Dixon Line.

The Melvin Memorial, also called “Mourning Victory,” is the handiwork of another Concord native, renowned sculptor Daniel Chester French. It honors three of Concord´s citizen-soldiers, men who paid the ultimate sacrifice during the Civil War. Michael Richman, editor of the Daniel Chester French Papers, argues that the Melvin Memorial “is the single most important sculpture during his prolific six-decade career.”

Killed in battle

Asa, John and Samuel Melvin, all members of Company K of the 1st Massachusetts Heavy Artillery, were remembered by their youngest brother, James, also a Union veteran.

Twenty-seven-year-old Asa Melvin, a Concord farmer and the oldest of the trio, enlisted April 19, 1861, the anniversary of the Battles of Lexington and Concord, answering the call to defend the Union just as the Minutemen had been summoned to defend their homes against the British in 1775.

He saw action at the First Battle of Bull Run, after which his 100-day tour expired. He re-enlisted in August 1862, with the 1st Massachusetts Heavy Artillery, and then re-enlisted for a third tour of duty in 1863. Asa was killed before the Battle of Petersburg on June 16, 1864, and his remains were interred in a mass grave in Spotsylvania, Va. According to colleague Col. J. Payson Bradley, Asa was “a good soldier, spoken well of by all his comrades and officers.”

Death by disease

John Melvin, 20, enlisted in 1861 in the 1st Massachusetts Heavy Artillery. He was the second son of Asa Melvin and Caroline Heald Melvin. When the Civil War erupted, he was working with his younger brother Samuel in the textile industry of Lawrence, Mass.

Company Capt. William H. Merrow, a friend, comrade and fellow resident of Lawrence, said, “John was an exceedingly good soldier. He was a man who kept his equipments and clothing in perfect shape at all times. No sudden call for any inspection ever found John Melvin unprepared.”

Like many other Civil War soldiers, John succumbed to disease, dying of dysentery Oct. 13, 1863, in the military hospital at Fort Albany, Va. Keeping a bedside vigil were his brothers and an Army chaplain, at John´s request. Samuel recorded in his diary that the opium dispensed to John “did no good” and described John’s death thusly: “The doctor said he could not live until Noon. I was with him all the time. … He failed very fast from the middle of the afternoon and died very easy at last at 11 o’clock at night.”

John’s body was returned to Concord and was buried in the Melvin family plot in Sleepy Hollow alongside the grave of his mother, Caroline, who had died earlier in 1863. John is the only one of the three brothers buried in Sleepy Hollow.

Andersonville

During Gen. Ulysses S. Grant’s Overland Campaign, Samuel Melvin, 20, who enlisted at the same time as his brother John, was captured at Harris Farm, Va., on May 19, 1864. Of the five other members of Company K who were captured, four, including Samuel Melvin, would perish at Andersonville Prison in Georgia. He died there Sept. 25, 1864. His diary is considered an important primary source of a soldier’s experience at Andersonville, and its text was included in the Melvin Memorial’s monument dedication book.

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