Week 2 | First Meeting

             Hello all, Aaron reporting in again for the second week of the internship. This week has been a bit more work intensive, not in the internship itself, but in the work for all of my other classes. Even though the Olustee Project is not technically a “class” at UCF, it practically functions as one, meaning that this is the first semester I’ve had more than four classes. With a greater focus on my upper-levels and my Anthropology minor this school year, the workload has increased by a fair bit; it provides an obstacle for me to overcome when finding time to peruse the materials Dr. Gannon has been sending me and the team. Nonetheless, in the first few days of this week, I was able to read some of the material Dr. Gannon sent out, including a paper that summarizes the situation at the Olustee battleground (a summary more succinctly reiterated in the meeting we had today). I’ll give a similarly short summary for any students or faculty reading this not familiar with the battle and site.

              The gist of the Battle of Olustee and its graves’ condition to this day is that in the aftermath of the battle, many Union soldiers lay dead after they were routed by the attacking Confederates. The Confederate victory prevented the Union from gaining any further control of Florida. As a result of this, it proved exceedingly difficult to retrieve the bodies of the Union soldiers for a proper burial in a national cemetery; the victorious Confederates simply dug a shallow mass grave and buried the Union dead. Surveyors were later sent in the years after the Civil War had ended, and this group found that many of the remains of the Union soldiers (now skeletons) have been disinterred by animals. The surveyors gathered the bones they could find in bags and reburied them, promptly forgetting about the site. By 1912, almost fifty years after the battle, the United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC) had bought the land and erected a monument to the Confederate soldiers that died at Olustee. Another portion of the battlefield, which was determined to be the most likely place for the Union mass grave, was acquired by an African-American cemetery. Only in 1991 was some semblance of a memorial to the Union dead placed at the site in the African-American cemetery; this grave marker has little information about who actually lies in the mass grave. 

               As of today, there is a general awareness that there lies a Union mass grave at the Olustee site, but no local group has any desire to place a proper memorial there for various reasons—both because of the soreness of the Confederate “Lost Cause” issue in American memory, as well as the fact that the Olustee battleground (state land) is surrounded by the Osceola National Forest (federal land). Therein lines our mission: to get the national government to create a proper grave site for the Union dead at Olustee. In our meeting today, we discussed the primary vector through which we are going to work toward this goal: determining the names of those Union soldiers who could be buried there. Myself and my other colleagues are going to work with Dr. Gannon’s military history class to cross-reference a book of the soldiers that participated in the Battle of Olustee with records of the individual regiments that participated in the battle. We have a spreadsheet that has pinpointed five of the regiments that saw the greatest loss of life at Olustee in proportion to the rest of the regiments there. By looking into the records of soldiers that were a part of these five regiments, we can determine which soldiers died at Olustee and are likely the ones buried there. For example, the Olustee battle book might state a soldier was “NFR”: no further record. We can then look for that soldier in the records of his regiment to see if his death or disappearance occurred at Olustee.