This is the story of two men from the Village of Walden: William and Lyman Fairchild. The brothers were born in Chenango County, New York; William in 1833 and Lyman in 1826 to Treat and Electa Warner Fairchild. Laborers, they moved with their mother to Walden and appeared in the 1850 census as workers in the cloth mills.

Lyman, the older brother, was a married man of 24. His wife, Fanny, was 27. However, by 1855 he is listed with his 2nd wife, Mary Buckley. Fanny died prior to that census. Lyman and Mary were married June 10, 1854, in Walden. There were no children listed until 1860 when Lyman and Mary had a son, William Treat aged 1 year. Lyman was then 35 and Mary 39. A year later another son was born, Franklin.

William Fairchild was 17 and living with his mother, siblings and an older man who may have been his mother’s husband in 1850. On June 15, 1854, William and Susan Tears were married in the Reformed Church at Walden, and by 1860 the couple had three children, Curtis aged 5 and Francis 1 and a girl, Carrie 3 years old.

By this time, there were two operating woolen mills in Walden, the award-winning Scofield, Capron and Company along the Wallkill River on Oak Street, and another mill owned by Giles Andrews an English immigrant at the foot of Oak Street. In 1856 the New York Knife Company moved to Walden and occupied the old cotton mill at the High Falls bringing more industry to the newly incorporated Village of Walden (1855). Life was good; and even if there were rumblings of the armed conflict that would consume the continent the following year, one wonders if people realized at the time how it would change their lives forever?

War, and with it the possibility of death, knocked on the doors of many people in Walden in August 1862. In July of that year, New York State Gov. Morgan appointed a military committee of seven men in response to President Lincoln’s call for ‘three hundred thousand three years’ men’ and tasked them with raising a regiment of enlistees in Orange and Sullivan counties. The war had not been going well for the Union, and this call was “an urgent appeal to the waning patriotism of the people for yet another mighty army of Volunteers.”

The Regimental History of the 124th NYSV written by Lt. Col. Charles H. Weygant documents the results of their efforts; 994 men answered the call and served under the leadership of Col. Augustus Van Horne Ellis. Men from the various communities of Orange County filled the ranks by August and mustered out in September. Company H became known as the ‘Walden Company’ and it was in this unit that William and Lyman Fairchild, and many of their co-workers and friends, marched off to war; William held the rank of Corporal and was a Color Bearer, Lyman was a private.

The battles of the 124th NYSV are etched in the granite of the Civil War monument in Walden’s Village Square and on a bronze plaque attached to the base of ‘The Volunteer’, a statue in the Wallkill Valley Cemetery dedicated to the Walden men of Company H, the gift of Col. Thomas W. Bradley. Included on this list are the names of William and Lyman Fairchild. Brothers-in-Life and Brothers-in-Arms, they shared a common fate.

Lyman Fairchild was one of 48 wounded enlisted men in the Battle of the Wilderness on May 5, 1864. He was sent to Mt. Pleasant General Hospital, a Union facility in northwest Washington D.C. where he was treated for a gunshot wound to the leg, but where he died on May 14 from tetanus. The record of the Soldiers’ Home in Washington states that he was ‘taken by his mother.’ The accounts of the Millspaugh Funeral Home indicate that indeed, the Fairchild family received a credit for the government issued casket that transported Lyman’s body home, and the Town’s Register of Men Who Served in the Civil War notes that he was buried in the Methodist Church Cemetery on Center Street in the Village of Walden, a final resting place for a gallant soldier. Or was it?

On December 17, 1863, Giles Andrews, owner of the woolen mill at the foot of Oak Street, and a member of the Walden Methodist Church, conveyed by deed a parcel of land on Center Street to the Trustees of the Church to be used as a burying ground. It is not known for sure who the first burials were on the site, as the parcel was already owned by Andrews. What is known is this: in 1875 residents living below the cemetery on North Street began to petition the Village government to close the cemetery and have the bodies removed, which is exactly what happened. They were concerned that burials would contaminate their wells.

According to the records of the Wallkill Valley Cemetery, Lucy Andrews, widow of Giles Andrews, purchased a plot in that cemetery probably at the time of her husband’s death in 1877 because there were no longer any burials at the former Methodist Cemetery. Sharing the Andrews’ plot are members of the Belknap and Snyder families, and Lyman Fairchild as well as a stone for a Mary A. Fairchild dated 1858. The Wallkill Valley Cemetery was incorporated in 1865 and the first burial was 1867 so none of those buried in the Andrews plot who died before those dates could have been buried there. We can, therefore assume, that they had been moved from Center Street to the new burial ground.

What then of William Fairchild? And why did the Fairchild family go to such great effort to retrieve Lyman’s body? The Orange Blossoms fought at Chancellorsville, Virginia from May 1 to 3, 1863. Casualties totaled 204 men, with 36 enlisted men dead on the battlefield: William Fairchild being one of them. In the early stages of the war, it was common to bury the dead where they fell, and such was the fate of the younger Fairchild as recorded in the Town’s Register. Two brothers served the cause of unity; two women became widows; five children suffered the lose of their fathers, only one of who came back. The war knocked on many doors in Walden; many answered its call; many paid a price that would change their lives forever.