Willard Wade McKinley was 17 years old when he enlisted in the U.S. Navy, the day after Christmas in 1942.

He was weeks away from his 20th birthday when he died, one of seven sailors killed on May 17, 1945, after a kamikaze plane penetrated anti-aircraft fire and crashed into the USS Douglas H. Fox during the Battle of Okinawa.

The son of Nessie Vogan and Evan Lee McKinley, a recipient of the Purple Heart and Asiatic-Pacific Campaign Medal, was returned home a final time for a hero’s farewell in Colorado Springs’ Evergreen Cemetery, with a headstone denoting his service and sacrifice, under a waist-high metal trellis laced with climbing roses.

On a May afternoon some eight decades later, Evergreen Heritage volunteer Judy Speirs stooped to brush her hand over McKinley’s plaque, clearing it of crisped vines, leaves and cut grass kicked up by wind and mowers – a risk for such flat grave markers. She frowned at the weathered text, hard to make out in the mottle of shadow and light.

“He’s one that could stand to have his stone polished,” she said, leaning back to assess her handiwork before diving in for another sweep. Better. 

Things never meant to be buried can nonetheless get lost over the years in a cemetery this old and this big. Speirs sees her job – hers and the core group of Evergreen Heritage volunteers – as making sure forgotten doesn’t happen. Not on their watch.

“We want to make sure every single one of them is acknowledged and honored,” she said. “These are our boys.”

Evergreen Heritage was launched in 2004 by Dianne Hartshorn, who still heads up the volunteer group whose original mission was (and still is) focused on seasonal cleanup, maintenance and preservation at the Springs’ two oldest burial grounds: 220-acre Evergreen, established in 1871 on what then was the city’s southeastern outskirts; and the significantly smaller, but older, Fairview Cemetery, off 26th Street on the west side.

Both locations contain civilian plots (and a number of noteworthy individuals, including Helen Hunt Jackson), and also were the final destination for local service members who fell in battle, who were veterans of wars and conflicts, and who served their nation in peacetime for generations prior to the opening of Pikes Peak National Cemetery in 2018.

“Evergreen is a cemetery that has Civil War, Indian War, Spanish-American War, World War I and II,” as well as those who served in more modern conflicts overseas, Speirs said. “It has a lot of history.”

A lot of history that arguably faced consignment to confusion, conflation and even oblivion before cadres of volunteers stepped in, more than two decades ago.

Correcting the record for those lost

A self-described “military brat” raised in an Air Force family, Speirs had recently moved to the Springs from Montana when she saw a blurb about Evergreen Heritage and its need for helping hands. She signed up and ultimately found herself working with the cemeteries’ partnership with Wreaths Across America, a nonprofit that coordinates annual wreath-laying ceremonies at thousands of veterans’ cemeteries across the country, including Arlington National Cemetery. 

Such duties didn’t suit, but Speirs said she offered to head up a quieter project that could underscore any such efforts to come: Identifying each and every gravesite of those who’d fallen in battle, and all those who served their country.

After years spent volunteering at Evergreen, Speirs said she knew the cemetery well enough to know there were “more veterans here” than appeared on a list compiled as a badge-earning project by the Boy Scouts of America in the 1990s. 

Using that research as a starting point, though, Speirs and the volunteers hit the books, and the beat – to correct the record, and, for those whose final resting place didn’t bear an official military marker, give them their due.

“We started late last fall trying to see how many veterans headstones we can order from the VA for those vets who don’t have a headstone,” Speirs said, explaining that a number of reasons might lead to the absence of such a marker, including the family’s inability to provide the proper paperwork. “In the course of this, we’ve gotten our list at Evergreen up to over 4,800 veterans.”

More than a thousand hours of online and paper research later, connecting dots and questioning assumptions, she said, the official process is underway for approval of almost two dozen new military headstones from the VA.

Bataan Death March veteran

Sometimes, the historical rabbit holes of their sleuthing led Evergreen Heritage volunteers to facts that belied what previously was considered reliable confirmation of heroism and service. 

Case in point: A gentleman interred at Evergreen whose most prominent historical image features him sporting a World War I military uniform. A photo of him in prison garb was likely more apt, as Speirs said volunteers’ research found the man actually was an inmate of the New Mexico state penitentiary system at the time of the war.

In another instance, a man interred under a marker bearing the title “general” turned out to have most likely never served in the military at all.

“He was an attorney general in Kansas,” Speirs said. 

In an example of history literally uncovered, a service member’s etched-in military record had over the years become obscured, as his upright grave marker slowly sunk into the dirt.

“See the line there,” Speirs said, pointing out a now-faint tideline on the headstone. “Everything below that used to be under the ground.”

Tracing such records historical understandably gets more difficult the further back one must go, said Speirs, who said she maintains a monstrous spreadsheet “of every section, every plot number, first and last name, their date of service, the branch they served in, and then the conflict, if they served during a conflict period.”

“And we have men that served in multiple conflicts, World War II, Korea and Vietnam. We have gentlemen that were taken prisoner of war. We have one who was in the Bataan Death March during World War II,” she said. “I mean, they all have an interesting story”

And for some of them, the ultimate sacrifice to their country came years after they served in battle. 

Respite from consumption

Originally known as Decoration Day, Memorial Day began as a way to honor fallen Civil War soldiers, and was set aside as a time for friends, family and patriotic Americans to visit cemeteries to decorate the graves of the war dead with spring flowers, wreaths, and flags.

A number of veterans of the Civil War, whose devastating casualties were due in large part to disease rather than battlefield injuries, ultimately succumbed years after service, after travelling to Colorado Springs in a bid to treat consumption contracted during their recovery or after returning to plague-ravaged homes, in weakened and often half-starved states, after surviving the war.

“A lot of them came here because they were suffering from consumption,” Speirs said. “There’s one man that got someone to drive him to Colorado Springs in a wagon, and three days after he got here, he died from tuberculosis.”

For generations, Evergreen was “the destination” for the region’s war fallen and veterans. 

Efforts to “repatriate” their remains, from burial places sometimes half a world away, often involved years-long ordeals.

“We have had vets post Civil War, or they’re serving in the Indian Wars, and they die in Nebraska or North Dakota, and they bring the body all the way here to be buried,” Speirs said. “And think about that late 1800s and you’re transporting that body, that is a big deal.”

A ceremonial toast

In 2016, the remains of Navy Ensign John Charles England – killed aboard the USS Oklahoma during the attack on Pearl Harbor and buried for 75 years in an unknown grave at the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific – were reinterred at Evergreen, in a memorial service with full military honors that drew hundreds. 

Floyd K. Lindstrom, the World War II hero who lends his name to a downtown American Legion post, as well as the VA clinic atop Fillmore Hill, had a relatively speedy journey to his final resting place.

Lindstrom was buried in Evergreen in July, 1948, after he was killed in action at Anzio in 1944 and originally interred in Nettuno, Italy. 

Each year on Memorial Day, the members of Post 5 convene at his grave for a ceremonial toast — just one of the many events they host at the cemetery, honoring war heroes and veterans. 

Keith La Mee, historian for Pfc. Floyd K. Lindstrom Post 5 of the American Legion, said he was aware of a number of service members killed in battle and buried at Evergreen – including Lindstrom, England, and Pvt. Merle McCreery Bunce, who died of pneumonia shortly after landing at Saint-Nazaire, France, and was originally buried in the American Cemetery there before his his body was returned to Colorado Springs in September 1920.

Willard Wade McKinley, though? He wasn’t yet on La Mee’s list. 

Fewer than 200 rose bushes remain of the more than 1,000 rose plants that originally earned Evergreen inclusion in Guiness Book of World Records, as the world’s “largest outdoor rose garden.”

Some legacies are impossible to carry on. Others just need one person – or a collection of dedicated volunteers – to care enough.

“Just look at that picture. He looked like he was a fun guy to be around,” Speirs said, calling up the enlistment photo of McKinley on her cellphone – a boy in Naval uniform, with a smile so genuine it makes you want to smile, too. 

Even when you know how the story ends.