Memorial Day 2015: ‘Always remember’

FARMINGTON – After veteran Robert Cox carefully placed a wreath at the World War I monument and trumpeter Sturges Butler played a solemn Taps, American Legion Post 28 Chaplain Langdon Adams reminded those at today’s Memorial Day observance, “Always remember the awesome cost of the freedom we enjoy today.”

Wreaths were also placed at Meetinghouse Park’s monuments during a parade through downtown.

Memorial Day “is to remember those who have died in the service of our country,” Paul Mills noted at services held at the Roderick-Crosby Post 28 on Monday morning. The monuments where wreaths were left today pay homage to local veterans.

The World War I monument, modeled after the Arc de Triomphe in Paris, France, sits at the intersection of Main and Box Shop Hill Road. John Teague bequeathed the monument to the county. Teague was a Civil War veteran.

The Civil War monument in Meetinghouse Park was erected in 1903, a gift to the town from saw mill owner George Ranger. Ranger’s promise to build a monument came after he challenged the town to clean up and formally landscape the park after many years of neglect. The town did and Ranger ordered the granite obelisk to be designed to match Gettysburg’s, which honors the 16th Maine Infantry.

Over half the registered voters in Farmington, totaling 305 men at the time,  were sent to serve in the Civil War. Of those, 73 didn’t come home, Mills said, “a reminder of the fact that Maine furnished a greater percentage of its peoples to the cause of the Civil War than any other Union state.”

The World War II Honor Roll was was installed in the park in 1945. This was dedicated before the end of that war. The Rotary Club raised the funding for the monument which lists 657 local names of veterans who served. Of those, 20 were killed in action.

The American Legion installed a monument to the veterans of all wars outside its post on Middle Street in 1981 and another one in 2006 at Meetinghouse Park to note the more modern wars.

Mills also told of little known instances when Americans were killed on U.S. soil.  Though kept secret by the military, the 49 officers and crew members of the USS Eagle-56 were killed when a German U-Boat sank the vessel just 9 miles off the Maine coast at Cape Elizabeth. The reason for not disclosing the true cause of those deaths, Mills said, was at the time to not panic or demoralize the American public. Instead, families were told by the U.S. Navy a boiler exploded on the Eagle. That U-Boat was sunk two weeks later in Narragansett Bay in Rhode Island.

Another instance that brought the war home occurred in Oregon when a young mother on a picnic with five children were killed after a balloon bomb exploded as they approached it.  The bomb had been sent from Japan a few weeks before and had landed in the park.

“As we thus observe this Memorial Day holiday, let us therefore remember not only those that gave their lives in other countries, but also those victims of that war here on our own soil and at our own shores at home,” Mills said.