Grave ceremony to honor fallen Civil War soldier

2-18-26

By Lauren Royce, Editor
MESHOPPEN — Every soldier, no matter how long ago their last battle was, deserves to be remembered. That’s why Kevin Reynolds is trying to help reserve the memory of Levi Warner, a Civil War soldier from Meshoppen. Reynolds lives in Utica, NY, but found out he has distant family ties to the fallen soldier and wanted to do something for him.
“It seemed like an injustice,” Reynolds said. “He provided service to his country, to my family and nobody knew. In Levi’s file, it says record of burial and place of veteran. One of the categories says headstone and has none.”
The ceremony is scheduled for May 23, at Bunnell Cemetery in Meshoppen. Bunnell Cemetery Association in Auburn Township is facilitating the ceremony. Rev. Tenny Hutchinson, Pastor, Tunkhannock United Methodist Church, will provide the benediction and graveside services.
“At a grave marking, the stone will have been set before. So what we’re doing is a ceremony to mark the fact that this person is here. At the ceremony there is usually, in the case of a veteran, a pledge of allegiance, a salute– the reenactors may bring someone to play taps. Levi was a methodist, so Rev. Tenny Hutchinson will be providing what those services are.”
After Warner returned from the Civil War, he married Sarah Jane Dunlap, and had nine children. But they all went through the Harford school (Soldiers Orphans School in Kingsley) so he wasn’t able to provide as much as he would like, Reynolds said. Dunlap died in 1888, and it seemed the family then lost all contact with Warner after the children went through the school and dispersed throughout the country. Warner was then a widower, and would meet Reynolds’ relative Mary Reynolds Carey later on.
Reynolds said he has been doing his own family genealogy for 40 years, and has been following Carey’s line.
“I see that her first husband, Lewis Carey died in 1899. And she’s got five minor children home and three grown children not at home and she needs something, somebody, to be sheltered. So she married this fellow (Warner).”
Reynolds’ relative Carey and Warner were married for 15 years, but records had a blank where Warner’s name should have been, and it sent Reynolds searching for who Warner was since he had died of the Spanish Flu in 1920, four days apart from Cary’s mother in the same house. Originally, Reynolds was trying to find Cary’s death certificate, but ended up finding a record of a disabled soldier who did his best for his wife and children as he navigated bouts of bureaucracy not unlike today’s disability system for veterans.
“I knew he was a Civil War veteran, he probably had a pension, he was married to my relative,” Reynolds said. “They would have documented when the pension stopped by a death certificate, and that’s what I was really looking for, was the death certificate for my relative. I knew it’d be in his pension file, So I paid $100 to get his pension file and sure enough, I found it, but I found all this other stuff. About how he was wounded. He spent a long time, most of his life, traveling between Auburn and Philadelphia to document the progressive deterioration of his arm due to this wound that he received when he was just after his 18th birthday. And I kind of got involved in his story. So I said, You know, this guy was a mensch. He provided shelter to my family, you know, he served his country and even after he died, his pension continued to my relative.”
But after Warner’s death, Carey had a time dealing with the systems in place even then.
“What happened was there was a series of laws that dealt with pensions and increasing the amount of pensions, over the time period from the 1870s through the early 1900s,” Reynolds said. “My relative had a right to his pension until she died. She’s writing her congressman. She’s getting affidavits, she’s from her neighbors saying yes, I was his wife (saying), don’t drop me here, because I’m his widow,” Reynolds said. “Affidavits and congressmen and all lawyers involved, to try to maintain that pension coming to her and she eventually won, it worked.”
Reynolds said he found two local relatives to Warner down the line, one was the LaRue family out in Rush and the other was the Bennett family in Montrose.
“To me it was part of the forgotten nature of all this,” Reynolds said. “I was just flabbergasted at the amount of time he spent dealing with paperwork and bureaucracy even then. I said, wow that some things never change.”
Reynolds said he had known of Warner’s existence since at least the 90s, but before digitization of records became the norm, digging for information was much more difficult. Now, Reynolds said, digitization allowed him to do further research he couldn’t have done before. About two years ago, he went back in trying to find more on Warner.
“From a genealogist point of view, there wasn’t a whole lot there,” he said, with Warner not being a blood relative. “Pennsylvania digitized all the death certs from 1906-1970, and then I got a hold of it.”
One of the difficulties of getting the headstone was making sure Warner absolutely did not already have a plaque.
“In FindAGrave, there were 274 memorials in Bunnell Cemetery, but all the ones with stone, none of them were Levi,” Reynolds said. “When I looked at the last time the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs went out, (it) was 1942. He did not have a stone.I’ve been having some difficulties getting somebody physically on site there— so Gabe Sheldon at Sheldon Funeral Homes said, ‘here’s what you do. Go ahead and apply for the plaque, and If they have one, if one has been issued or if there’s a marker— They’ll let you know and they’ll issue you a plaque.”
Reynolds said he was especially grateful to Gabe Sheldon and Bryant Dibble at Sheldon Funeral Homes in Laceyville. Reynolds said Gabe Sheldon walked the entire cemetery to make sure a stone was not already there for Warner. He said they have been “wonderful to work with, walking me through the procedures required, providing services free of charge, connecting with the cemetery association, etc. I’m doing all this long distance and could never have done it without them.”
Robert Baker, Sons of Union Veterans of the Civil War, Lt. Ezra S. Griffin Camp #8 (Scranton, PA) will be speaking about topics including the Harford Soldier’s Orphans Homes, which the Warner children went through.
In attendance will be Lorraine Smith, Regent, Tunkhannock Chapter Daughters of the American Revolution. Mark Kahn, Reenactor with the 143rd PA Volunteer Infantry will also be there. This unit during the Civil War saw battle at Chancellorsville, Gettysburg, Spotsylvania Courthouse, Cold Harbor and other pivotal engagements.