If we are open to them, the Cape’s hidden stories are sometimes in plain sight.
For example, I often drive down Quaker Meetinghouse Road in South Sandwich on the way to doggie daycare. But something kept catching my eye on the north side of the road, just past the Stop & Shop: A small white arrow, topped by an American flag, and reading “Historic Site,” points into the woods.
One day I stopped and discovered a path bordered with cut pine logs. About 300 yards in was a fenced enclosure with another American flag on a flagpole. A boulder engraved with “Wilson Burial Ground'' was outside the fence. Inside, there was a grave marked with a worn headstone stating the name Joseph Wilson and his designation as a member of the 73rd US Colored Infantry, one of the first all-black regiments to fight in the Union Army during the Civil War. A bouquet of faded, artificial sunflowers was in the ground next to the stone.
On my way back, I realized I had missed the official Grand Army of the Republic marker at the edge of the woods. It described Wilson as a former slave who fought for the Union and then moved to Sandwich sometime in the 1870s.
Yet, despite the new-looking historic marker, the site had a slightly careworn ambiance that didn’t imply any official caretaking. Who was Wilson and what loving hands had worked so hard to preserve his legacy?
In fact, several people are to be thanked for the fact that Wilson is remembered at all. This includes former Sandwich archivist Barbara Gill and current archivist Deborah Rich; Eagle Scout Alex Moore of Sandwich, who restored the neglected burial site in 2012; Bill Daley, a member of the Sandwich Historical Commission who researched Wilson last year; and Jim Coogan, a long-time Cape historian and writer who asked the Sandwich Visitor’s Bureau to pay for the historic marker and installed it in 2020 after he followed the white arrow. The site is maintained, Coogan says, by a group of teens organized by a former U.S. Marine.
There are really few known details about Wilson beyond what’s on the marker. He may have been born in Virginia or Maryland and then sold to an owner in Louisiana, where in 1862, after New Orleans was defeated, he enlisted in the Union Army. He was about 19. Army records show he earned between $6 and $9 a month until he mustered out in 1865 with a final payment of $22.
Having survived slavery and the war, he somehow made it north, perhaps wending his way over a thousand miles through hostile and war-torn states. No one knows how or why he came to Sandwich but he was here by 1874 when records show he married Caroline Philips, a resident of Mashpee who may have been born in Nova Scotia. They arranged to sharecrop the land in South Sandwich but apparently it was subsistence. Wilson died of tuberculosis in 1886, probably in his 40s, after a stint in the Sandwich poor farm. The town archives hold a $5 receipt from Dr. Alexander Booker who cared for him, as well as the invoice for $2.50 from the man who buried him. Caroline died in 1891, and also lived for a while at the poor farm, once located where Crow Farm is now.
It’s hard to imagine how difficult Wilson’s life must have been. Another Joseph Wilson, who was also a former slave turned Union soldier, went on to become a famous author and orator. But not Sandwich’s Joseph Wilson.
His and Caroline’s lives would have been hardscrabble. And, they seem to have left no children or any other legacy that we know of. Wilson began his life in a system that did not even recognize him as a person and as a man of color in 1880s Sandwich, he would have been either invisible or unwelcome. He had few interactions with the official record — and who could blame him? We don’t even know who arranged for the veteran’s tombstone on his grave. Or, for that matter, who left the faded bouquet? As Coogan says, “Our Joseph Wilson was not much of anybody’s history.”
One job of the historian is to make the invisible visible. And for that Coogan and the others who have taken an interest in Joseph Wilson deserve credit. It should encourage all of us to be open to the clues around us and to follow the threads that lead to the Cape’s hidden corners.
