Veterans

	TRR photo by Ed Wesely The Dexter maple, November 2003. (Click for larger image)

When C.R. Dexter marched off to war in the 1860s, the giant black maple tree, below, was probably a sapling. Growing in fertile bottomland soil only a stone’s throw from the Delaware River, it’s now reckoned by foresters to be the largest of its kind in Pennsylvania.

After the war, on hot summer days, Dexter and his son must have sheltered their team in its shade. Family records also recount Sunday school picnics under its boughs.

It’s known, too, that C.R. Dexter soldiered in the Army of the Potomac, and that he marched with Grant’s army to Cold Harbor on the outskirts of Richmond. There he was wounded in June 1864, perhaps during a furious assault that saw 7,000 Union infantrymen shot down in less than an hour.

Attacking well-prepared Confederate trenches, Grant previewed the slaughter meted to French and British troops on the Western Front 50 years later.

I don’t know if C.R. Dexter became active in veteran’s organizations, or whether he marched in Fourth of July parades.

His quiet and lasting testaments, a short walk from the family cemetery, are the patriarch maple and a sturdy bank barn where visiting school kids gambol with the resident chickens and goats.