Let Us Remember

by Susan Dechant

 

Just before Memorial Day 2011, I was asked if we had a list of those Stevens County people who had died in the various wars. In fact, we had several. A closer look at those lists revealed that they did not agree and they did not include the recent wars. That discovery has prompted a massive research project to verify who should be on that list today and to find something out about each of these people who are already on the monument.

   

For those who don't know, the monument stands in front of the Colville courthouse. At present, there are 150 names on the monument:  26 names from WWI, 111 from WWII, 5 from Korea, and 8 from Vietnam. These are the names of soldiers from Stevens County who died during war-time service since WWI.

 

So then we wondered who is in charge of actually putting the names on the monument. Our concern was that no names had been added since Vietnam yet we knew that more lives had been lost. We discovered that it was the American Legion who had been responsible for adding names but, since there were no declared wars since Viet Nam until recent years, the project had been forgotten. Now we have Desert Storm, Iraq, and Afghanistan to consider. The Legion is interested in resuming this project once it has been determined what names to add.

 

The next question became what were the actual requirements for selecting names to be added to the monument. Discovered in a 1950 newspaper article when names from WWII were to be added, "The Legion has placed only one restriction on those to be listed. The veterans must have been bonafide residents of Stevens County at the time they entered service." Starting with the list actually on the monument today, we compared that with our various other lists and tried to verify and determine if names needed to be added. This proved to be a complicated search and we decided it would be appropriate to research each person listed, to learn something about them.

 

Following is a list of the names on the monument as it appears today (November 2012). All the names will eventually be hyperlinked to the stories I wrote. These hyperlinked files include the stories as well as the local newspaper articles I located during my research. My thanks to both the Statesman-Examiner and The Chewelah Independent for allowing me to share them with you. If you are interested in receiving my complete research file on one of these soldiers, please contact me at research@newgs.org and request a copy. These people need to be remembered, not just as names on a list.

 

World War I (to read the entire article on the WWI soldiers as published in the Silverado Express, click here)

 

World War II (to read the entire article on the WWII soldiers as published in the Silverado Express, click here)

 

Korean War (to read the entire article on the Korean War soldiers as published in the Silverado Express, click here)

 

VietNam (to read the entire article on the VietNam soldiers as published in the Silverado Express, click here)