by Lisa Schauer
Commemoration of a Civil War veteran’s restored gravestone, along with the dedication of an informational sign, is planned for a Veterans Day event on Tuesday, November 11 from 2 until 4 p.m. at Greenway Cemetery in Berkeley Springs. 
Guided tours of Civil War graves will be provided during the event.
Historians Daniel Murphy and Steve French will be featured as speakers.
Steve Keith and Josh Hetrick from Lost River Band will perform live music.
Reenactor Bob O’Connor will portray President Abraham Lincoln’s close friend and bodyguard, U.S. Marshal Ward Hill Lamon.
Co-sponsors of the Veterans Day event include Civil War Trails Organization, Morgan County Commission, Morgan County Historical and Genealogical Society, Berkeley Springs Rotary Club, and the Town of Bath.
Local historians flip for Civil War graves
Sixty-two former Civil War soldiers are buried in an old section of the 40-odd acre Greenway Cemetery, owned by the Town of Bath since 1882.
Union veterans are buried in 47 marked graves at Greenway. Former Confederate soldiers are laid to rest in 15 marked graves there.
Brevet General Simon F. Barstow’s grave has been restored and will be commemorated.
Barstow was born in Salem, Massachusetts in the early 1800s. He served as a high-level chief of staff, or adjutant, in the Union Army during the Civil War.
He died on July 31, 1882, and is buried in Greenway Cemetery.
In the farthest corner of the old section of Greenway Cemetery sits the gravestone of an unheralded local Civil War legend.
There lies Eleanora Dawson, member of a local Confederate family, with Morgan County being part of Virginia — the capital of the Confederacy, during the Civil War. 
At 18 years of age, Eleanora was said to be tending the family farm with her younger brother while the men went to war.
When Union soldiers came knocking, she fled into the woods, clinging to her guns for three nights, until her brother pledged allegiance to the United States.
Eleanora Dawson lived to be 95. She is buried in Greenway Cemetery next to her husband J.C. Barney, and a child.
Cemetery lore
One of Greenway’s caretakers has said Brid. General Barstow’s gravestone is the only one that keeps flipping over after being set right on the hilly slope of the graveyard.
The Yankee general’s grave next door continuously flipping over might be Eleanora Dawson’s rebel spirit at work? Or the spirits of Salem, Mass. — Barstow’s birthplace — followed him down south? Skeptics might say Barstow’s gravestone just wasn’t fitted properly for the terrain or time has unsettled it.
Either way, there’s no need to whistle through the graveyard at Greenway Cemetery, where Civil War history will come alive on November 11.
