City Hall & Boston Twp offices are dedicated to veterans Offices of Village of Saranac Village
& Boston Township
Saranac, Ionia County
"In memory of the soldiers
1861-1865"
There are two memorial locations in Saranac. The first is the building that houses the village and township offices. A plaque attached to the 1954 building dedicates it as a memorial to veterans. The second is a haphazard collection at the village cemetery, literally stuffed in the farthest corner of the property.
The day I visited the American flag was hung from the rusty flagpole with a broken lanyard. Other than mowing the grass and trimming the weeds, it's obvious this area doesn't get much in the way of visitors - or attention by caretakers.
The Civil War memorial consists of a 10 pounder Parrott Rifle (cannon) mounted to a concrete base. The muzzle of the cannon indicates this artillery piece was cast at Cold Spring, New York, in 1864 by West Point Foundry. The 10 pounders were carried to the battle mounted on a two wheel carriage and they were used to throw a three inch solid ball, or "shot" about one mile across the battlefield. Anything in the way of the shot was literally torn to pieces by the impact. A hit to the torso of a soldier nearly guaranteed there was nothing left to identify, nothing but scattered bits of flesh and bone would be found later.
"Dog Tags" as we know them today did not exist in this wartime era. Soldiers would routinely etch their names on pieces of leather and stuff them in their boots in a futile effort to give the survivors a way to identify their bodies. Unfortunately, the impact of several pounds of cast iron to a body usually pulls the body out of the shoes and rips clothing to shreds. It's not surprising that thousands of men were unaccounted for after the Civil War. Casualty reports frequently consisted of confused accounts given by the survivors, men who had seen their friends blown apart by the hand of fate.
The second artillery piece is a 155MM Howitzer placed by VFW Post 4363 in 1946. This cannon shows the science of artillery had improved a great deal in the 80 years since the Civil War. These cannon were usually mounted in concrete bunkers dug into the sand dunes. An extensive line of artillery installations, from Maine down through the Gulf Coast, were manned by Army personnel and the thought of a great time at the beach may have prompted a few volunteers. But the reality was that the bunkers of the coastal defense system were damp, dingy, places where duty hours seemed to drag to infinity. Protecting the coastline from submarines and seaborne invasion forces was an important job, but it rarely brought much excitement to the troops.
The Coastal Artillery Corp was disbanded soon after World War II. The guns were scrapped and the bunker abandoned in favor of increased naval vessel production that could actually take the fight to the agressor. The coastal batteries could only shoot about 12 or 15 miles at best, and their fixed position made it easy for any enemy to figure out the unprotected areas and land there. German submarines of the Second War played havoc with US shipping, but there is little evidence that they thought the Coast Artillery was much of a threat to them.
