I may be among the SOBs, the Sons of Both: family records suggest I have both Confederate and Union Civil War veterans among my ancestors. I’m far from alone in my possible SOB status. Or so I recently learned from Nick Smith, President of the Pasadena Civil War Round Table (PCWRT for short).
As Smith informed me during a recent interview, “This many generations along” from the war, SOB status is “actually not uncommon.”
When I told Smith my knowledge of the US Civil War (1861–1865) could be summed up in one brief Wikipedia-style paragraph, he said that’s not uncommon either, “especially here in California, because people don’t think of California as having been part of the war.”
To dispel this misconception, a visit to Altadena’s Mountain View Cemetery helps. The cemetery was established in 1882. About six hundred Civil War veterans, mostly Union but some Confederate, are buried there. Who were these vets? How did they serve in the war? What are their stories?
These and other questions of local Civil War history will be addressed at the PCWRT’s 2025 Memorial Day Ceremony at the Mountain View Cemetery on Monday, May 26th starting at 2pm. The free event will include walking tours of the cemetery led by Smith.
The PCWRT has held a Memorial Day event at the cemetery for many years. Most Americans know Memorial Day as a federal holiday honoring all the US military personnel who have lost their lives serving in the US Armed Forces. But the holiday began over a century and a half ago as a day to remember the Union soldiers lost in the Civil War.
As Smith explained, “Right after the end of the war, women both north and south were heavily involved with putting on the very first memorial ceremonies.” Following their example, in 1868 John A. Logan proclaimed May 30th a national day of remembrance to honor the Union soldiers who had died in the war.
Logan was the leader of the Grand Army of the Republic, a Union veterans’ organization founded in 1866. May 30th was known as “Decoration Day,” due to the practice of placing flowers on veterans’ graves. Only in 1971 did the US Congress change the nomenclature to “Memorial Day.” By then, the holiday had long become a day to remember all US soldiers lost in the line of duty.
The PCWRT Memorial Day event at the Mountain View Cemetery seeks to revive local traditions of Decoration Day, with its Civil War focus. Smith knows the history well.
In Pasadena, from the 1890s to the 1940s, on Decoration Day a memorial church service would be held downtown. After the service, participants would ride the trolley up Fair Oaks to arrive at the Mountain View Cemetery at about 2pm. There they would conduct ceremonies at the cemetery’s two major groupings of Civil War veteran grave sites.
Many US cities have Civil War Round Tables. These organizations multiplied in the early 1960s as the centenary of the war’s end (1965) approached.
The last Civil War vet residing in Pasadena passed away in 1946, Smith mentioned, and nationally the last surviving Civil War vet passed away in 1956. With the loss of living memories of the Civil War, an organized effort to keep the war’s history alive became even more important.
And yet that history is only a few generations away. When Smith joined the PCWRT, one of his fellow members was the son of a Civil War veteran.
Among the Civil War vets buried at Mountain View is Thomas F. Ellsworth (1840–1911). As you can learn from the cemetery Web site, in the Union Army Ellsworth attained the rank of captain and was in command of Company B of the 55th Massachusetts Colored Infantry. Ellsworth was a Civil War Medal of Honor Recipient.
Another Civil War Medal of Honor Recipient interred at Mountain View is Milton Lorenzo Haney (1825–1922). He was a soldier in and served as Chaplain for the 55th Illinois Volunteer Infantry.
Many of the Civil War veterans buried at Mountain View came to Pasadena years after the war.
According to Smith, several of the residents of the “Indiana Colony” founded in 1874 that then became the incorporated city of Pasadena in 1886 were Civil War veterans. Starting in the early years of the city, Civil War veteran residents would write letters to their veteran friends living in parts east.
If the letters’ recipients liked what they read about Pasadena, and had amassed enough ready cash, they would often move west to the sunny climes the city offered. Pasadena was just a transcontinental railroad ride away.
As Smith can amply detail, the lives and accomplishments of Civil War veterans are woven into the history of Pasadena. Anyone who enjoys sitting with friends in a bleacher on Colorado Boulevard to watch the Tournament of Roses Parade owes a debt of gratitude to Civil War veteran John McDonald (1849–1932), who arrived in Pasadena in 1886, where he became a real estate agent.
The members of Pasadena’s Valley Hunt Club staged the first Rose Parade in 1890, but the popular annual event soon became too much for the Valley Hunt Club to organize. With the possible demise of this Pasadena real-estate-boosting event looming, McDonald went into action, going to Pasadena businesses door-to-door to organize funds and volunteers to keep the parade going. In recognition of his efforts, he was named Grand Marshal for the 1928 Rose Parade.
California’s Civil War history not only involves Pasadena becoming a destination for Civil War vets. Smith notes that Union “troops from California actually fought in the Civil War in Arizona.” In 1861, forces of the Confederacy took possession of a section of the New Mexico Territory from the Union to found the Territory of Arizona, or Confederate Arizona.
If attending the PCWRT Memorial Day event at the Mountain View Cemetery leaves you wanting to learn more about the South West theater of the Civil War, consider reading historian Megan Kate Nelson’s 2021 book The Three-Cornered War: The Union, the Confederacy, and Native Peoples in the Fight for the West.
Having conversed with Smith, this SOB has a better understanding of how Pasadena’s history is a Civil War history too.
Deets
- Mountain View Cemetery, 2400 N. Fair Oaks Avenue, Altadena: Web site
- Pasadena Civil War Round Table: Web site
- The Three-Cornered War: The Union, the Confederacy, and Native Peoples in the Fight for the West, by Megan Kate Nelson. Simon & Schuster, 352 pages, $19.99. Available from local booksellers or through the publisher.
I’m living in Pasadena and my Father was from the south. Its seems so surreal when family back there told me that my great, great grandfather joined the Union Army in 1864.