Editor’s note: This column is adapted from an earlier article on the Memorial Day in Dorchester that was first published in 2017.
Monday, May 26, 2025 is Memorial Day.
For generations, Dorchester veterans and their families and supporters once gathered in Cedar Grove Cemetery for solemn ceremonies to remember the fallen who served the United States under arms in wars foreign and domestic. That tradition was upended by Covid-19 and has not yet been restored.
In past years, the Cedar Grove observances centered on a granite statue that stood as a silent sentinel inside this burial ground since the late 1860s.
The statue is meant to depict Captain Benjamin Stone, Jr., who led a band of his Dorchester neighbors into battle in the War of the Rebellion, 1861-1865. Stone was one of 97 Dorchester men who did not return home alive. In a town that was then home to just 2,000 residents, 97 men lost was a heavy toll indeed.
Ben Stone was a citizen-soldier who answered President Lincoln’s call for volunteers and joined the 11th Massachusetts Regiment. Like most men in the Union ranks, he was not bred to be a foot soldier or artilleryman. In fact, he was a music engraver and painter by trade.
Nonetheless, Stone’s neighbors no doubt saw something special in him when they elected him to lead them into war before the First Battle of Bull Run in July 1861. A little more than a year later, Stone and his men were badly mauled — along with much of the Union army — in the Second Battle of Bull Run.
Stone was mortally wounded as he led his neighbors in Company K against Confederates dug into a railroad cut near Manassas, Va. in August 1862. He died some days later in nearby Washington D.C. He was 44 years old and left behind a widow, Ursula, and their young daughter, Sarah. He was buried in the North Burial Ground in Uphams Corner, where he rests today.
From 2016— a 21-gun salute at the G.A.R. plot in Cedar Grove Cemetery.
Photo by Chris Lovett
After the war, the local Grand Army of the Republic post, a fraternal organization of Civil War veterans, was named after him. The post was located on Park Street in Fields Corner and Union vets would march from there in large columns to Cedar Grove Cemetery where many of their war dead were interred in 1868. More comrades who survived the war would join them later in the plot beneath the statue to Capt. Stone.
Since 1868— with a few exceptions for poor weather— the men and women who have followed Stone in defending the United States have gathered around his statue on the last Monday in May. It was a brief, but solemn ritual that typically ended with a volley fired from a contingent of men clad in Union blues representing a Massachusetts volunteer regiment.
It was a small part of a larger ceremony that once drew hundreds of neighbors to the cemetery each year for speeches and a call of the roll of older veterans from Dorchester posts who have passed on in the last year. Mayors, governors, senators, military leaders of the highest rank spoke at the event, including future President John Fitzgerald Kennedy. Most years, the ceremonies also spotlighted local veterans, many of them recently returned from service in foreign postings.
Capt. Stone and his fellow citizen soldiers from Dorchester who marched thousands of miles to preserve the Union and, ultimately, to halt and destroy the evil institution of slavery, are men who should be remembered.
Bill Forry is the executive editor of the Dorchester Reporter.
