J. Marshall McMillin is all but forgotten.
Laid to rest in a tiny, 19th-century cemetery most local residents wouldn’t recognize, let alone be able to find, McMillin is listed on findagrave.com with dates of birth and death unknown.
He is, however, identified by Lawrence County’s Office of Veterans Affairs as a Civil War veteran, and when he and five others from that conflict who are buried at Normal Glen Cemetery in Shenango Township needed help, it was a group of veterans from other wars who answered the call.
Members of VFW Post 315 — the last VFW post in the county — responded with chainsaws and elbow grease last month when a fallen tree compromised the cemetery grounds.
“The person who takes care of it and mows that cemetery contacted my wife,” said post Commander Richard Putnam, whose spouse, Jesse Putnam, is the director of the county’s Veterans Affairs office. “My wife told me that there was a tree down, so we took the weekend and went out and cut up the tree.
“We’re still trying to get back out there with a shredder to take care of the branches and stuff like that.”
According to the National VFW’s website, the organization’s mission is “To foster camaraderie among United States veterans of overseas conflicts. To serve our veterans, the military and our communities. To advocate on behalf of all veterans.”
Cleaning up a cemetery where veterans rest in peace checks a couple of those boxes.
“We try to do as many things within the community and the organization as much as we can,” Putnam said.” We’re a smaller post. I think we have 250 members, but we only see the regular members and I think the auxiliary has a couple hundred.
“But we try to do what we can in the community.”
For one thing, Post 315 members will place flags on veterans’ graves before each Memorial Day. Recently, they raised $3,000 at a spaghetti dinner for a member battling cancer, and they provide another $3,000 each year as a scholarship for a deserving UPMC Jameson School of Nursing student.
The post is also the local-level sponsor for the National VFW’s patriotic essay contests, “Voice of Democracy” (for high school students) and Patriot’s Pen (middle schoolers), and it participates in local veterans events such as the annual Lawrence County Stand Down and Veterans Day Parade. In March, it invited all county Vietnam War vets to the 1820 E. Washington St. post for a special dinner in their honor.
SMALL NUMBERS
Not only is Post 315 the last VFW stronghold in the county — there were once five, Putnam believes — it’s also one of the smaller ones in the state, according to its commander.
With a larger membership, it stands to reason the post could do even more to execute its mission of serving both veterans and the community.
However, VFW posts across the country have been finding it a challenge to muster new faces.
According to a 2022 report at military.com, “the VFW had a record 2.1 million members in 1992. By (2021), that number was just a shade over one million, meaning it … lost half its members in a generation.”
Many of those losses have been due to the passing of members who served in longer-ago conflicts, such as World War II and Korea.
“There are only like three World War II veterans left in Lawrence County,” Putnam said. “Vietnam veterans are dying as well. Then there was a large break between Vietnam and Desert Storm.
“We have a lot of Irag and Afghanistan veterans (locally), but so many of them, they came back, they had their family, and there just wasn’t a whole lot of interest in joining a fraternal society.”
In 2019, the VFW reported that its 27-year membership decline reversed course with the addition of 25,000 new members.
However, Post 31 has an additional hurdle to expanding its duty roster – its headquarters.
BIGGER HOME
“The problem that we are facing now is that we have been in this building since 1954, and it is falling apart,” Putnam said. “We are really only able to utilize one floor, which is the first floor. The basem*nt is not handicap accessible. So we are really, really focused on getting a new building. We’ve been able to save about $40,000 in our building fund.
“We really need a bigger place where we can do more events because right now I can only fit 50 or 60 people in there at a time.”
Prior to the VFW moving into the building 70 years ago, Putnam said, it was home to a grocery store, and the owner rented the upper floor to returning veterans.
Still, nearly a century of accommodating veterans isn’t enough to keep the building from needing to be replaced, agreed Ruth Fairchild, the post’s judge advocate and UPMC Jameson materials supervisor for whom the post’s nursing scholarship is named.
“We’re so small, we honestly need a bigger building to be more family-friendly, to be able to do more family activities,” said Fairchild, who has held offices on the local, district, state and national VFW levels, including national surgeon general (the first woman to hold that post) and Pennsylvania department commander (the first Desert Storm veteran in that office). “We’re trying to get there; it is on the forefront.
“Every little bit of extra money that we have we put into the building fund because we’re just putting money into the building to try to maintain it the best we can. So that takes away from other things. It’s so small that we can’t have bigger functions for veterans because we don’t have a hall. We try, but we’re limited on the number of people we can bring in.”
Putnam has seen what is capable when facilities allow.
“I travel around to a lot of the different VFWs,” he said. “Crawford County has a really neat program where they provide, with the VA, telecommunication devices to elderly veterans, so they come to the VFW to do their medical appointments electronically. They’ll have coffee, doughnuts and stuff like that.
“Those are some of the things I’d like to start seeing. I’d like to start seeing some peer support groups, PTSD, survivor benefits. All those things I would like to see, but we just need a bigger location. We just can’t do it where we’re at currently.”
OUTSIDE THE POST
In the meantime, Fairchild noted, Post 315 is out in the community, doing what it can.
One outreach is a district-level motorcycle group open to posts in Lawrence, Beaver and Butler counties, which can provide fundraising as well as fellowship.
“Our post actually started the motorcycle group,” she said.
“There are several across the state affiliated with VFWs. Generally, it’s not just posts; they come out of the district. So we do travel to the posts in the district, and some of the riders do ride with us, but for the most part I think most of the riders are from out of our post.”
Post members will also do nursing home visitations, and their Buddy Poppy sales — more commonly conducted around Veterans Day but sometimes for Memorial Day as well — help pay the dues for veterans who are cared for there.
“They’re in a nursing home, but we want to keep their membership alive and keep them as part of us,” Fairchild said.
Also outdoors is a depository for worn and tattered U.S. flags, located on the front porch of the post. Anyone can put such star-spangled banners in the box, and they will be given to local Scout troops to burn in a proper ceremony.
“We get a lot of them,” Putnam said of the flags. “I empty that box out about every two months, and it’s not a small box. And it’s good for the Boy Scouts to learn, to teach them respect and what that ceremony is all about – the sacrifices that people have made for the flag.”
d_irwin@ncnewsonline.com
