Four Long Island Civil Veterans were honored at a ceremony dedicating new headstones on their graves in a cemetery in Uniondale in time for Veterans Day. Greenfield Cemetery, on Nassau Road, is where the men’s remains lie. The Moses Baldwin chapter of the Sons of Union Veterans applied to the Veterans Administration for the new headstones, which were placed on October 15, 2022. According to the Long Island Herald:
One of the Civil War veterans buried at Greenfield Cemetery is Albert Henry Rhodes, who lived in what is now Malverne.
Dennis Duffy, camp secretary and graves registration officer, explained the activities of his camp and the process of locating the unmarked graves.
“In a nutshell, our mission is to remember the boys in blue, those who fought to save the Union and abolish slavery,” Duffy said. “One of the things we do is to try to locate unmarked graves of Civil War veterans and then obtain a headstone for the grave from the Veterans Administration.”
Rhodes was born in December of 1843, according to records from the New York State Military Museum, but his exact date of birth is unknown. His surname was also spelled “Rhoades,” because record-keeping was not standardized at the time….
On Jan. 17, 1862, the then 19-year-old Rhodes enlisted as a private in the 95th New York Volunteer Infantry Regiment. He probably would have enlisted at the Union Army’s recruiting office in Manhattan’s City Hall Park — which was a ramshackled construction area covered in large advertisements boasting of generous wages for those who took up arms. At that time, there were no bridges over the East River, and Rhodes likely got to the recruitment station by ferry.
He willingly volunteered, since the Militia Act of 1862, enabling states to draft people into service, would not be passed until July of that year.
The 95th Infantry was officially organized under the command of Col. George H. Biddle on March 6, 1862, to serve for a term of three years. On March 18, Rhodes’s company was mustered out of Fort Columbus — now called Fort Jay — on Governor’s Island and sent to Washington, D.C.
For a short time, the 95th Infantry served in the garrison of the nation’s capital before being deployed in the campaigns against the Confederacy in Virginia.
The 95th would see action in many of the Civil War’s most well known and decisive battles, including the second battle of Bull Run, the battles at Antietam, Fredericksburg, Chancellorsville, Gettysburg, the Battle of the Wilderness, and the final Appomattox Campaign, at which the bulk of Confederate forces surrendered.
While it is difficult to know whether any individual infantryman fought in a battle, Duffy said that companies were rarely separated from their regiments, and that Rhodes was almost certainly in most, if not all, of the battles that involved the 95th Infantry.
There is little information about Rhodes’s life after the war. The 1920 census lists him as married to a woman named Catherine. According to Ancestry.com, he fathered a son, William E. Rhodes, who was born in 1890, though the site offers no further information on William.
Rhodes died on April 21, 1926, at age 82, and he was buried at Greenfield Cemetery in Uniondale. His grave was unmarked, even though he would have been entitled to a government-issued headstone.
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