MILTON RESIDENT HONORS SOLDIER DEAD ANNUALLY

GASTON

Posted By: Gloria Dodds (email)
Date: 10/29/2002 at 17:34:19

Page Fifty-Four The Keosauqua Republican Thursday, August 15, 1935

MILTON RESIDENT HONORS SOLDIER DEAD ANNUALLY

For the last fifteen years E.E. Gaston of Milton has been decorating the graves of the soldiers of one war or another in nine different cemeteries in and near Milton. Each Decoration Day Mr. Gaston visits these graves upon which he places the American flag. He has the war record of many of these soldiers. Last Memorial Day Mr. Gaston visited and decorated 82 soldiers' graves.
Mr. Gaston does this for purely patriotic reasons and to honor the soldier dead. His father and two older brothers all fought in the Civil war. Mr. Gaston tells the following interesting story of his brothers enlistment at a war camp:
His two brothers ran away from their home in Senecaville, Ohio, and hid in a grove of trees until a tradesman came along in his large wagon in which he was taking produce, vegetables, butter and eggs to the open markets in the city of Columbus. This man was singing so lustily that he did not hear the boys sneaking into the back of his wagon and did not discover them until they were almost to Columbus. It was too late then to make the boys get out and return home, so he allowed them to ride on with him. As soon as they reached Columbus, the boys alighted from the wagon and hurried as fast as they could to Camp Chase where they enlisted.
In the meantime the boys; father learned of their escapade and immediately followed the boys into Columbus. When he arrived at Camp Chase, and found that the boys had already enlisted, he too enlisted and the three went to war together.