Abstract: This article discusses the analysis of a stereoscopic image of the St. Francis Barracks Post Cemetery in St. Augustine, Florida, taken at the close of the US Civil War. Wooden headboards captured in the image reveal the names of Union soldiers of the 7th Regiment of New Hampshire Volunteers. Over time, the inscriptions on the wooden headboards became illegible and they were replaced with coquina markers bearing Roman numerals. Those markers also disintegrated in the Florida sun. When the Quartermaster General’s Office decided to place standard marble military headstones on the graves of the unknowns in 1905, there was no record of the time period of the burials. The proximity of the unknown graves to the Dade monuments—erected at the end of the Second Seminole War in 1842—caused confusion. The quartermaster decided that the gravesites were Seminole War dead and therefore ordered sixty-eight headstones with inscriptions of “Unknown U.S. Soldier Indian Wars in Fla.” Close examination of the stereogram clearly shows burials from the Civil War occupy the sites with present-day mislabeled headstones.
Amy L. Giroux (Thu,) studied this question.