Memorial Day is a time to remember those who made the ultimate sacrifice--those who never made it home to family and friends.
Here at Fort Ticonderoga rest the dead of three countries from two conflicts. In death, they share a common fate--they are unknown soldiers. Beneath the green grass and trees are buried soldiers from France and Great Britain, soldiers who died an ocean away from home for King and Country. Also buried are soldiers from the colonies, who fought for their King during the French & Indian War. And here are the remains of men who fought and died for a new nation--men from New York, New England, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey, who joined together to fight for a new ideal, for a new nation, conceived in liberty.
The birth pangs of that new nations, the United States of America, happened here at Fort Ticonderoga, and at places like Bunker Hill, Brooklyn Heights, Germantown, Morristown, Charleston, and Yorktown. These men, who lie here under the blue skies of a late May morning, are joined in spirit by fellow soldiers who died at Plattsburgh, Vera Cruz, Gettysburg, San Juan Hill, Verdun, Normandy, Pork Chop Hill, Da Nang, Beirut, Baghdad, and Kandahar.
Whether these men at Ticonderoga died in battle, or died from the numerous diseases that ran rampant through an 18th-century military encampment, they made the ultimate sacrifice. Most were young men, men in their late teens and early twenties, who found themselves far away from home on the North American frontier in the face of an enemy, an enemy not much different from themselves. Some sought adventure, most merely were doing their duty as they saw it. All of them now rest unknown, the dead of France, Great Britain, Canada, and the United States. One cannot but wonder--did their loved ones back home learn of their fate, or did they just vanish from memory, never to be heard from again?
Fort Ticonderoga serves as a daily reminder that the freedom and privileges we enjoy come with a cost. While we remember the fallen of the French & Indian War and the American Revolution at Ticonderoga, let each of us also resolve to remember those in uniform today around the globe, carrying on the tradition and the idea that we are still a nation conceived in liberty, dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal!
Beth L. Hill
President and CEO
