Two headstones sit off to the front side of the small cemetery beside Willis United Methodist Church. The cemetery and church, while not part of the national battlefield park, are part of the Glendale battlefield.
The 69th Pennsylvania Infantry marched past the church to fill a gap in the Federal lines, just a half mile northeast, during a critical phase of the June 30, 1862 battle. One of the Confederate formation engaged was Brigadier General James Kemper’s brigade. In his official report, Kemper wrote:
A more impetuous and desperate charge was never made than that of my small command against the sheltered and greatly superior forces of the enemy. The ground which they gained from the enemy is marked by the graves of some of my veterans, who were buried where they fell; and those graves marked with the names of the occupants, situated at and near the position of the enemy, show the points at which they dashed against the strongholds of the retreating foe.
One of Kemper’s veterans was Captain Joel Blackard, of Company D, 7th Virginia Infantry.
Service records show Blackard hailed from Smyth County, in southwest Virginia. He’d only months before been elected captain of the company. Kemper singled out Blackard for special mention in his report, but offered no other details of the captain’s death. Still his headstone marks, as Kemper said in that July 1862 report, the advance of the regiment.
Next to Blackard’s headstone is that of another fallen warrior.
Staff Sergeant John H. Park served as the flight engineer on a B-26 bomber in the 552nd Bomber Squadron, 386th Bombardment Group based in England in the summer of 1943. On September 8, 1943, his plane, nicknamed “Margie”, took part in a raid on the Lille-Vendeville airfield in occupied France. Over the target, “Margie” took a hit from anti-aircraft fire. Lieutenant Romney J. Spencer, piloting “Margie,” managed to nurse the plane on one engine to within five miles of the Cliffs of Dover. Losing altitude, Spencer ditched the bomber in the English Channel. During the crash, Park fell into the bomber’s nose. Park was either killed by the impact or otherwise unable to escape from the rapidly sinking plane. He was the only member of the crew to go down with the bomber. (a very detailed account of the mission was written by Chester Klier, historian for the 386th Bomb Group, for the B-26 Crewmembers Website.)
Park’s name appears on a tablet of missing aircrews at the Cambridge American Cemtery and Memorial, Cambridge, England. And an additional memorial headstone stands next to that of Captain Joel Blackard in the Willis Church Cemetery.
Two headstones that link wars and battles fought a half a world and decades apart.










