By Christine M. Quirk — Christine@concordbridge.org
One hundred sixty-one years after his death, George Washington Dugan’s name is finally being honored alongside his fellow fallen Concordians on the town’s Civil War Monument.
Pvt. Dugan, the town’s only Black Civil War soldier, was celebrated in a Monument Square ceremony the weekend before Veterans Day.
“We are correcting an oversight, and we are doing it properly,” Select Board chair Mary Hartman said. “It’s not a footnote, it’s not a sidebar, it’s not an addendum. We are placing George W. Dugan’s name in its rightful place as an equal standing among his contemporaries.”
Concord Museum curator David Wood said the square was the perfect place to honor Dugan, who had worked as an ostler, or stableman, at the Middlesex Hotel, which stood at Main and Monument Streets.
In that role, “George Dugan knew absolutely everything that was going on in Concord,” said Wood, who sat on the Civil War Monument Task Force. “It is a particular pleasure to think now we’ve brought George Dugan back to George Dugan’s neighborhood.”
A son of Concord
Dugan was born in Concord around 1817 and, along with his equerry work, was a local farmer. As a Black man, he was ineligible to volunteer for the militia in 1861 when President Abraham Lincoln called for volunteers after the attack on Fort Sumter.
That changed with the Emancipation Proclamation on January 1, 1863. On February 20, Dugan, 43, enlisted in the 54th Massachusetts, the first Black regiment to serve. He and 50 others were lost on July 18, 1863, in the battle of Fort Wagner, South Carolina.
Though it was presumed that Dugan did not survive, the Army didn’t change his status from “missing” to “supposed killed” until 1932. Task Force member Beth van Duzer said Dugan and his fellow soldiers probably lie in a mass grave; last year, the town placed a marker for him in Sleepy Hollow Cemetery.
The town originally dedicated its Civil War monument on April 19, 1867, with 32 names. Updates came in 1883 and 1915, but Dugan was still not included.
Correcting this, Rick Frese said, was a decade-long endeavor.
“This initiative began with a formal submission, including documentation, to the Select Board in 2014,” said Frese, chair of the task force. “It subsequently gained impactful traction with inspiring letters from Sydney Pomponi’s fifth-grade class at the Willard school.” (See sidebar.)
Absent Dugan’s birth record, advocates relied on voter, land, and marriage records — and, Wood said, the journals of Henry David Thoreau, who wrote of seeing Dugan around town.
Dugan “was a farmer, a Black man who volunteered to fight for what he believed in, even though he lived marginalized in this country, and that takes a special courage,” Hartman said.
Van Duzer said the Massachusetts State Historical Records Advisory Board and the Community Preservation Act provided funds to recast and replace the plaque.
‘The fair fan of Heaven’
The obelisk, van Duzer said, was once called “a pencil sharpened at the end as if ready to write the deeds of the Concord boys on the fair fan of Heaven.”
“Ebenezer Rockwood Hoar thought the names on the monument would teach future generations lessons of patriotism and courage,” she said. “Here we are, 157 years after the original dedication of this monument, adding a 49th name that will finally have his deeds written on the fair fan of heaven.”
Teachers Sydney Pomponi and Katie Vaudrain unveiled the plaque. Frese and Cat McGrath, whose late husband, Matt, served on the task force, laid a wreath.
“As a young girl in grammar school, I thought that history was simply the recording of facts,” Hartman said.
“Now I understand that history is a seeking,” she said. ‘It’s a seeking to understand who we are as a people, who we are as a community, and who we are as a country. It’s a story we tell ourselves so that we can live together.”
