Private William Henry Christman
Some 160 years ago this week, all that was mortal of Private William Henry Christman, late of Pocono Lake, Pennsylvania and a recent enlistee with the 67th Pennsylvania Volunteer Infantry Regiment, was buried in what was then part of Arlington House, the seized former state of Col. Robert Edward Lee (USMA 1829)– a regular who had resigned his commission and had cast his lot with the Confederacy, and wife, Mary Anna Randolph Custis.
Christman, a 20-year-old farmer, enlisted in March 1864 but just two months later succumbed to rubella in a Washington, D.C. hospital on 11 May 1864, being buried in Arlington two days later, soon joined by service members who were wounded in the Wilderness and never made it back to their unit.
Today, Pvt. Christman is in Section 27, Grave 19 at Arlington National Cemetery, and the estate, purchased for $26,000 in back taxes by the federal government on 11 January 1864, is the final home of some 400,000 men and women who have been laid to rest in the cemetery’s rolling hills.
Arlington held a commemoration of Pvt. Christman’s burial, as well as the fallen from The Wilderness, this week.