Administrative Information

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Preferred Citation

Grand Army of the Republic Reunion Photograph, n.d., Accession #11436, Special Collections Department, University of Virginia Library, Charlottesville, Va.

Acquisition Information

The Library purchased this photograph from Bookseller Jerry Showalter, Rare Books and Autographs, Ivy, Virginia on September 28, 1998.

Scope and Content Information

This item, a 9.5 x 7.5 inch black and white mounted photograph, ca. 1910, is of African-Americans at a reunion of Grand Army of the Republic (G. A. R.), in Norfolk, Virginia. It is believed photographer H. (Harry) C. Mann took it at Elmwood Cemetery. (In 1920, in the black section of the city's West Point Cemetery [now Elmwood], black Norfolkians dedicated a monument featuring a life-sized black Union soldier in remembrance of African-American soldiers and seamen. It remains the only black Civil War soldiers' monument in the South and bears the inscription, "To The Memory of Our Heroes.") Forty-one individuals, mostly veterans of black Union regiments recruited in the area during the Civil War, dressed in G.A.R. uniforms and insignia or civilian clothes, are present. 1

The first soldier on the left front row (wearing officers' bars, gauntlets and carrying a sword) may be wearing a Spanish-American War veteran's officer's uniform. According to a lithograph broadside, "Soldier's Memorial/Spanish-American War of 1898" by F. A. Neubauer of Cincinnati, Ohio, and a Jones family tradition, this soldier may be Kinchen Jones, who served as a wagoner in Company D, 6th Virginia Volunteer Infantry Regiment (Sixth Virginia Volunteers), mustered into federal service at Norfolk on August 4, 1898. It is also believed one of the elderly veterans in the photograph is Kinchen Jones' father (front row, third from left, with a white moustache; front row, second from right, with white moustache and goatee, or, second row, fourth from right, with a white moustache, goatee and bow tie).

Under limited digital scanning/enhancement Jones's collar bears the insignia "9th Va." However, published references concerning a black Virginia military unit with this designation have not been found. Another possibility is that he is wearing a G. A. R. uniform and "9th Va." designates a specific G. A. R. post in the Hampton Roads area. G. A. R. posts were racially segregated and often this veterans' organization did not permit blacks to join or participate in its activities, especially in the South. According to a 1900 Norfolk directory, there were three black posts in the city: Cailloux Post No. 2, Dalhgren [Dahlgren] Post No. 4, Shaw Post No. 5, and, an "Armory." Digital enhancement of the hats of two veterans suggests they were members of Dalhgren [Dahlgren] Post No. 4 (front row, second and sixth from left). 2

1 Norfolk & Portsmouth Virginia 1910 Directory (Norfolk: Hill Directory Company, 1910), 365 & 663, lists Harry C. Mann as a Norfolk photographer on 286 Main Street; Kirk Savage, Standing Soldiers, Kneeling Slaves: Race, War, and Monument in Nineteenth-Century America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), 187. Nine United States Colored Troops units were organized in Virginia during 1863-64: six infantry, two cavalry, and one artillery battery. Five of the infantry regiments were organized in Norfolk and Portsmouth; most of their soldiers were former slaves. The 1910 city directory misspells "Dalhgren Post No. 4"; black Union veterans named it in honor of Colonel Ulric Dahlgren (1842- 1864), leader of the ill- fated Kilpatrick-Dahlgren Raid on Richmond. Ervin L. Jordan, Jr., Black Confederates and Afro-Yankees in Civil War Virginia, (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1995), 268, 286- 287.
2 J. L. Hill Printing Co.'s Directory of Norfolk, Portsmouth and Berkley, Virginia 1900 (Norfolk: J. L. Hill Printing Company, 1900), 783-784; Mary Rulkotter Dearing, Veterans in Politics: The Story of the G. A. R. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1952), 34; Stuart Charles McConnell, Glorious Contentment: The Grand Army of the Republic, 1865-1900 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992), 71, 211-218. Information concerning the Kinchen Jones family was provided by Mr. Jerry Showalter of Ivy, Virginia.