Ronald Tittle, a Vietnam War veteran, was homeless when he died, with no known family.
Dozens of veterans and their supporters gathered Thursday at the Donel C. Kinnard Memorial State Veteran Cemetery to pay their respects to one of their own.
Ronald Tittle, a Vietnam War veteran, was homeless when he died, with no known family.
Gary Parkhill of Grafton is the Patriot Guard’s state chairman. He led a group of about 15 motorcycle riders to the Kinnard cemetery Thursday to honor Tittle.
Parkhill said he didn’t know Tittle, and his group got the notice of Tittle’s burial at the last moment.
“It was short notice, it came to me the night before,” he said. “And of course, I accepted it, as soon as I saw it, even though it’s this far, two, two and a half hours away from me. So it was something I wanted to do. So that’s why I’m here, to show my honor and respect for this hero. He’s a hero, he’s a Purple Heart recipient.”
Veterans from the Donel C. Kinnard veteran’s cemetery carry the remains and a flag to be honored by attendees July 18, 2024.
Photo Credit: Eric Douglas/West Virginia Public Broadcasting
Parkhill is on the road a lot. He says he’s run 54 missions in a year and half.
“In fact, we have another one tomorrow in Ravenswood,” he said. “So I’ll be over there. I’ll go back to Grafton, get a good night’s sleep and then I’ll come back down to Ravenswood tomorrow for that service.”
The West Virginia National Cemeteries Project pairs history graduate students from West Virginia University with high school students from Grafton High School to delve into the lives of veterans buried in the local cemeteries.
Kyle Warmack, West Virginia Humanities Council program officer and the project’s facilitator, said the project’s goal was to foster deeper engagement with the stories and sacrifice of local veterans, but also to promote important research and writing skills.
“At the Humanities Council, I have the privilege of working with a lot of folks in academia at the college level, and when you talk to them, there can sometimes be frustration with the students that they have coming in, and the level of experience they have with research and writing,” he said.
For the cemeteries project, Warmack helped pair history graduate students from West Virginia University with high school students from Grafton High School to delve into the lives of veterans buried in the local cemeteries. Grafton was a logical place for Warmack to start the project.
“Look at Grafton and the long history that they have with the cemetery, with the Memorial Day parade they have here,” he said. “Parades are wonderful, these are wonderful displays of both community and patriotic sentiment. But when do we get a chance to tell the stories behind the veterans that we’re celebrating? There are thousands of headstones in these cemeteries.”
The Grafton National Cemetery was established in 1867 as a permanent burial site for Union soldiers who had died in hospitals and on battlefields throughout West Virginia. Two years later, the town held its first Memorial Day parade, a tradition that continues to this day. Then, in the 1960s, the West Virginia National Cemetery was established five miles away in Pruntytown as the Grafton cemetery began to fill up.
Some of the students from Grafton High School and West Virginia University that participated in the West Virginia National Cemeteries Project pose for a photograph at the Taylor County Historical and Genealogical Society Monday, April 24, 2023. Credit: Chris Schulz/West Virginia Public Broadcasting
For high school students like Karigan Roudte, who researched the life and World War II service of twins Charles and William Lewellyn of Harrisville, the process was eye-opening.
“It’s an amazing experience. I honestly have never really thought about war as much as I have,” she said. “It’s brought so much insight to me to see how these twin brothers, they grew up together and they died together, how they intersect. It’s honestly a real changing thing, how I thought about war and life, and it’s brought such a new world and opened so many different doors to me. I think it’s a really great thing that they brought us to be able to experience.”
Becky Bartlett is a teacher and librarian at Grafton High School, and along with her colleague Richard Zukowski, she supervises the students’ research. Bartlett said the project is an engaging way for her students to learn research skills that go well beyond the computer.
“Probably one of the most important things for the kids of the 21st century to learn is that not everything is online. Since I have been the librarian, I have literally had students say to me, ‘It’s all online,’” she said. “They don’t understand, because they’ve grown up in a life that they can easily get online and search, that sometimes you have to go find a book. Sometimes you have to go to the courthouse and pull records. Sometimes you have to actually contact people to get interviews that were recorded, things like that, that aren’t online.”
Students had the opportunity to learn about major military events like the sinking of the USS Indianapolis in World War II, to the more human aspects of service, like Pauline Tetrick of Bridgeport who joined the Women’s Army Corps at the age of 36, at the end of the Korean War.
Beyond hard skills, one aspect of the project that Bartlett likes is that she can see it fostering a deeper interest in history, one that she hopes will last her students a lifetime.
“We have learned a lot just about the history of these wars that these veterans served in. I did not know the story behind the USS Indianapolis until we did this project,” she said. “There’s that rabbit hole, you learn something, and then you see the connection to it in so many places. And I think they’ll probably be learning stuff for the rest of their lives.”
One of the displays created by students presents information about veteran Bud Greathouse, who was killed in action serving on the USS Indianapolis. Credit: Chris Schulz/West Virginia Public Broadcasting
That level of engagement is certainly evident when speaking with Emily Bublitz who is a graduate student of history at West Virginia University.
“We do a lot of the back-end research,” she said. “In the initial stages, we go in and we have this huge master list of everyone who has been buried at the National Cemetery, then we go through and research the vets to try and get one that we find that has enough materials on them to know that we can write a biography based off of them, because some people, there’s nothing. Maybe, there’s like just a draft card, but there’s nothing else.”
For Bublitz, the most rewarding aspect of the project is precisely why it was established: making a human connection to the name on the gravestone.
“The more I learn about these veterans like that, the more I care about them and their stories, and I want to do them justice,” she said. “That becomes very central to how I go about doing my work with this. I see it as giving them back their personhood, because they’re more than just veterans. That’s such a core part of who they were, but they’re also more than that. I want them to be remembered as fully fleshed out people who had families and interests and hobbies.”
The West Virginia Humanities Council hopes to expand the project to more schools in the coming years.
Authorities are investigating reports of a small airplane going down in northern West Virginia.
State Police spokeswoman Shallon Oglesby told The Exponent Telegram that units were headed to the scene, which was in an unincorporated area between Grafton and Fairmont.
No further information on the aircraft was immediately available. The incident was reported to the emergency services office for Harrison and Taylor counties around 1 p.m. Monday. Emergency crews from Taylor County and the city of Grafton were responding.
On April 12, 1912, the Willard Hotel opened in Grafton with an elaborate banquet attended by state and local dignitaries and officials of the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad. It was built by Grafton attorney and industrialist John T. McGraw and named in honor of the B&O’s president, Daniel Willard.
p>The grand hotel was erected to lodge B&O passengers. The railroad had just finished a new depot adjacent to the Willard. Both the Willard and the new depot were built by the same contractor and featured the same granite and brick. The Willard was a thoroughly modern hotel for its time and boasted one of the finest ballrooms in the area.
The declining popularity of passenger trains during the 20th century took a heavy toll on the Willard. By the early 1960s, it was no longer used as a hotel but rather to house train crews. By 1988, it stood vacant. Beginning in the late 1990s, the Vandalia Heritage Foundation rehabilitated both the hotel and depot. The Willard Hotel is listed on the National Register of Historic Places as part of the Grafton Downtown Commercial Historic District.
On Christmas Eve 1852, the last spike was driven on the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad between Baltimore and the Ohio River. The event occurred at Rosbys Rock near Moundsville.
The Baltimore and Ohio—known as the B&O—changed the course of West Virginia history. It produced the first coal boom in the northern part of the state and led to the rapid growth of towns like Harpers Ferry, Martinsburg, Grafton, Parkersburg, Wheeling, and Clarksburg. During the Civil War, it played into the military strategies of both sides, and its tracks were repeatedly damaged and then repaired. When West Virginia statehood leaders carved out the new state’s borders, the eastern panhandle counties were included primarily to keep the B&O in West Virginia and outside of Confederate Virginia.
After the war and well into the 20th century, the B&O was a major force in the economies of West Virginia and the nation. By midcentury, though, it was suffering economically. In 1973, the B&O name disappeared when it was merged with the Chesapeake and Ohio and Western Maryland railways to form the new Chessie System, which is now CSX Transportation
On May 10, 1908, the nation’s first Mother’s Day observance was held at Andrews Methodist Episcopal Church in Grafton on the third anniversary of Anna Reeves Jarvis’s death. Jarvis’s humanitarian efforts were well known in Taylor County. She had worked at Andrews Methodist Episcopal Church for 30 years and long dreamed of a day dedicated to mothers.
Her daughter, Anna, was responsible for making Mother’s Day a reality. Anna advocated for Mother’s Day to become a national holiday, but the U.S. Senate defeated the idea the day before the first celebration was held in Grafton. Ministers, temperance groups, and women’s suffragists picked up the campaign and convinced 45 states to establish the holiday. On May 10, 1914, President Woodrow Wilson proclaimed the first national Mother’s Day—to be observed on the second Sunday of every May.
Anna Jarvis soon deplored how the holiday she’d help create had become so commercialized. She denounced Mother’s Day, referring to the floral, greeting-card, and candy industries as “charlatans, bandits, pirates, racketeers, kidnappers, and termites.”
Today, Andrews Methodist in Grafton is recognized as the International Mother’s Day Shrine.
