Southampton is right below Northampton, Massachusetts, as it should be. If your are visiting University of Massachusetts or Amherst College or the other six schools nearby, you may want to visit this very early monument to the Civil War dead put up just a year after the fighting had ceased. When I visited the site in November, 2024 it had not rained for almost two months and the graveyard where the monument is located was dry and dusty.
The monument is located in Center Cemetery on High Street, which was founded in 1738.
In 1860, Southampton was a small town of only 1,130 people. It now is six times as large.
131 men were credited from the town as giving Union services, and 28 died in the war.
O.M. Clapp, a local stonecutter, set up a temporary shelter in the cemetery in 1866 where he could cut the rocks and assemble the monument.
While the monument says it is from 1866, scholars are not sure when it was dedicated.
There is an insignia of muskets and swords overlaying a cannon. A shield says that the men “DIED FOR THEIR COUNTRY.”
In the photo below is a 2009 marker adding additional names to the dead. Three died in Washington, where many military hospitals were located.
The monument gives credit for the erection of the memorial to “S.C. Pomeroy,” a local school teacher and an outspoken abolitionist who went to Kansas before the war to fighting against the state being admitted as a slave state. In 1858 he was elected mayor of Atchison, Kansas. In 1861 he was elected by the legislature to be a Kansas senator in Washington. In Washington, he met with Frederick Douglass and advocated for the ending of slavery. He later became the president of the Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fe Railroad. He also served as president of the National Equal Rights Association during Reconstruction and he advocated for people of all races and both sexes to have the right to vote. In the 1870s, Pomeroy was accused of bribery to secure his reelection to the Senate.
On the plinth are the names of the men from the town who died as well as where they lost their lives.
The monument is made of sandstone. Atop it sits an eagle. In 2015 the monument was cleaned and restored during the Civil War Sesquicentennial.
In the photo below, you can see the dryness of the soil.
More names of those who died in the war. By the way, there are 19 Civil War veterans buried in the cemetery.
After I visited this site, I had my lunch at the Montague Bookmill in Montague, Massachusetts where they have a cafe. Lunch in a bookstore, a perfect repast.
Sources:
Massachusetts Civil War Monuments Project
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