BETHEL — About a decade ago, the piece of land in the downtown where the Civil War Soldier’s monument stands was renamed Veterans Honor Roll Park. It became a park before an honor roll was placed there, but after nearly a dozen years, an honor roll now stands there recognizing more than 1,350 servicemen and women from Bethel and Grafton, Mason, Albany and Riley townships who honorably served their country.

The honor roll will be dedicated during a dual Memorial Day ceremony at 10 a.m. on Monday, May 30.

For more than a decade, volunteers dedicated to the vision of having an honor roll installed at the park have worked to bring this vision to life.

The plan for it was first jotted down on a napkin by John Head and Craig Ryerson. Richard Grover, who was the treasurer of American Legion Mundt-Allen Post 81, decided to get a group of volunteers together to see if there was interest in pursuing construction and placement of an honor roll, and there most certainly was.

The honor roll is not a project of the Legion, though, or of any other service organizations. It is a labor of love by a dedicated group of volunteers committed to honoring local military veterans.

Every member of the volunteer group is a business owner and all are veterans, wives of veterans or Auxiliary members.

Volunteers started talking up the idea among their friends and local business owners, and the group received its first $100 donation Sept. 27, 2011.

At the start, Grover chaired the committee. Ryerson took over after a year and has stayed in that position ever since.

His wife, Jane Ryerson, who has been one of the most active volunteers from the start, said the group was excited to get the ball rolling but “we knew we had a long way to go, so we got together to try to figure out how to do this. We got mailing lists from the chamber, a list of taxpayers, and we thought we could just solicit people individually by letter or something. We just didn’t know where to go.”

The group estimated the cost of the project at something near $250,000, which seemed an impossibly large amount to raise.

An 8-foot foundation that had to be poured under the two polished black granite walls “was $30,000 right there,” Ryerson said, “and Henry’s Concrete out of Harrison donated all of that.” They also received materials donations from Bruce A. Manzer Inc., which is now part of Pike Industries.

She said she was so grateful for the help she remembers crying in relief.

Volunteers sold a number of benches to raise money to create Veterans Honor Roll Park in Bethel. Judith Meyer/Bethel Citizen

She said someone from the chamber suggested the group contact Amy Halsted, creative director/owner of The Barn Collection, for help. Halsted offered a discounted rate to get fundraising organized, and the group got to work setting up placards in local stores and businesses, soliciting donations, selling pavers and selling benches for the park. The fundraising work went on for several years, including reaching out to a major donor who offered $50,000 toward the project.

In the midst of raising money, the Ryersons drove around Maine to look at other honor rolls to consider how theirs might be designed to make it unique.

Organizers approached Bruce Collette at Collette Monuments in Lewiston and he pulled together a design that the committee approved. The original project was supposed to be at the Fire Station on Mill Hill Road, and Collette fit the design to that space.

In 2013 or 2014, Jane Ryerson said she couldn’t remember the exact date, but then-Town Manager Jim Dorr asked the volunteers to pause their planning. He told them the town was in the process of obtaining the land around the Civil War Soldier’s monument on Main Street, and suggested perhaps the honor roll would be better suited to that space.

It was the space where John Head had originally dreamed the honor roll could be, but because it was privately held they hadn’t considered it. Now, they could.

The problem was, the space was different than the space at the Fire Station, so the group had to start over with a fresh design, and Collette worked with them to ensure the finished project would fit the new space. He also donated all of the labor to etch the walls, among other things, and has offered to come back and do future etchings as names are added.

Tax-free donations were funneled through the American Legion, and the Legion purchased a bench in memory of Leroy Bennett to help with the fundraising.

In 2018, Craig Ryerson wrote a letter to be presented to taxpayers at the annual town meeting seeking another $50,000. The town manager at the time suggested that request might be a little high for taxpayers to grant, and suggested the group lower their sights to $25,000, but Ryerson refused.

In June that year, read a statement at town meeting explaining what volunteers intended to do, and asked if anyone had questions. “There was not one peep,” Jane Ryerson said. “No one adjusted the amount. It just flew right through,” and that kind of unquestionable support for the project continued as volunteers sought materials and help designing the honor roll.

The land where the park stands had been privately owned, but local attorney and former state Rep. Jarrod Crockett, who now serves as Oxford County probate judge, provided pro bono legal work to help the group acquire the property, and organizers continued researching names to be included on the granite panels.

Ryerson said volunteers got veterans’ names from the Maine State Archives, pored line-by-line through rosters from local American Legion posts, looked at town reports, and contacted people in the townships of Grafton, Mason, Albany and Riley who could help provide names of veterans.

Ryerson went to local cemeteries and “would look at all my names that I had and I would go find the stone to make sure we had the spelling correct. And, if there was anything there to indicate they were in the conflict they were in.” The volunteers wanted to be absolutely sure they were getting the names right.

She said these cemetery tours were a lot of work, but she enjoyed seeing the headstones, seeing that Maj. Gideon Hastings, who was with the 12th Maine Battalion during the Civil War, is buried in Locke Mills village in Greenwood. She was also quite bothered by the condition of some of the stones which had been neglected or purposely broken.

At one of the cemeteries on Grover Hill, where a lot of American Revolutionary War soldiers are buried, Ryerson said she saw a number of Civil War-era headstones broken and displaced.

With the help of Steve Seames from the Greenwood Historical Society, volunteers were able to convince the town to go there and pressure wash the headstones and repair a number of them.

“I would be appalled as a citizen of this town to look at this cemetery” in that condition, she said. “I was saddened after going through these cemeteries and seeing these stones. There was nothing like seeing the condition of those stones in that cemetery.”

Ryerson also referred to “Find a Grave” website to search for graves, and found a good number of local veterans who were buried in West Paris, Norway and New Orleans. Each of those names are now on the honor roll.

The names were organized by war-era, starting with the American Revolution, and moving on through the War of 1812, World Wars I and II, and Korean and Vietnam wars and the more recent wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and the ongoing War on Terror.

The group decided early on that the names on the honor roll would be only for those who had been honorably discharged, although there are a couple of names of Civil War-era soldiers who had been dishonorably discharged and who then reenlisted and were later honorably discharged. “There are quite a few,” Ryerson said, “on the honor roll.”

Every name was verified through a DD-214, which is proof of discharge from the armed services, or through verification from veterans group, the Maine State Archives, or some other official source.

And, Jane Ryerson was clear, “it’s an honor roll, not a memorial. A memorial honors only those who are deceased” and it was the intent of organizers to honor all those who served.

The honor roll consists of two walls of polished black granite, shouldering an obelisk.

The obelisk was donated by the Phil and Mary Chadbourne Trust, Bob and Nancy Chadbourne and Family, and Arlan and Eleanor Jodrey and Family.

It reads: “In grateful recognition to all the men and women who have honorably served our country in times of war and peace.”

The base of one wall gently repeats that message, reading: “In grateful recognition to all the men and women  of Albany, Bethel, Grafton, Mason and Riley who have served our country in times of war and peace, active, reserve and guard.”

The base of the other wall is a quotation from Ronald Reagan that reads: “Some people live an entire lifetime and wonder if they have ever made a difference in the world. A veteran doesn’t have that problem.”

The granite walls are etched with nearly life-size images of uniformed members of the U.S. Navy, U.S. Army, U.S. Air Force and U.S. Marine Corps. The image of the Navy sailor is a woman.

And, on the far right and far left corners, there are legends that note whether a name carved into the granite was killed in action, missing in action or involved in multiple conflicts.

At some point in the future, the names of the volunteers responsible for the project will also be added to the granite marker, and there is plenty of room on the back to name future veterans.

The park is bordered by a wrought-iron fence handcrafted by students from Region 9 School of Applied Technology in Mexico.

Peter Barlow, who is the metal trades director for Region 9, was “more than enthusiastic in wanting to help on this because he said it would be a good project for the students,” Ryerson said. Students worked on the fence from 2018 to 2020, and volunteers intend to install a plaque at the park entrance on the Vernon Street side in recognition of their contributions.

“Those kids,” Ryerson said, “they were just so excited and so grateful. They were all pretty proud of what they did.”

Region 9 was able to get the iron for the project at cost for about $4,500. Volunteers had been looking at the material at a commercial cost of $80,000, so the help from the tech school was twofold: material and labor.

Ryerson said when people visit the park, they’ll see many different textures. “They’ll see walls of granite, a basement of cement, grass, wrought iron, cloth of the flags, and nature itself.”

She said it was important to organizers to ensure the park represented “strength and durability for years to come. Just like the American soldier.”

She and others hope that people will visit, sit and reflect on the names. Share a memory or a funny story, and perhaps some sad stories, about the veterans represented on the honor roll.

“Only another soldier knows the burdens” of a soldier, she said, and she hopes that as much as it may become a healing place, she also challenged local teachers to use the place for school projects. “Take a veteran’s name and research him. Students should be encouraged to visit this park, and we hope that they do.”

As proud as these volunteers are in creating the honor roll and the park setting, Ryerson said the greatest hope they have for the site is for people to “reflect on it and think about all those names on that wall, and what it must have meant for those who served and for their families when they were serving, not knowing when they would come back to their home.”

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