COLUMBUS, Ohio – Among the graves at Columbus’ Greenlawn Cemetery are those of Civil War soldiers and their untold stories of sacrifice, silenced by the beating drum of time. But one man made it his mission to make sure they are not forgotten.  

• Thousands of union soldiers across the Buckeye state are buried without an official military headstone, or their stone has faded with time.
• One Columbus man has made it his mission to preserve the memory of fallen heroes from centuries ago.  
• Paper records at Greenlawn Cemetery in Columbus, the second largest in the state, show there are 300 Civil War Veterans who never received a government marker.

“It was his legacy that got me interested in it and I stayed interested in it all my life,” says Columbus resident and Civil War Historian, Steve Ball. 

Ball grew up fascinated by this photo of his great-great grandfather, William Tyler Butts, a Union soldier born in Athens County in 1842. So fascinated—that when he got older, the Columbus native began researching his family tree. 

“I learned that after going through several of the worst battles of the Civil War, some of the most terrifying, in and 93-percent of the surviving men in his regiment in December of 1863 re-enlisted in the Union Army for the duration of the war,” says Ball. 

It took two years of research, but Ball was able to find his ancestor’s unmarked grave in Ross County in 1991.

“And I went down to Ross County and helped the caretaker of the cemetery set my grandfather's marker. He was wounded in action on June 19^th, 1864 at Kennesaw Mountain Georgia. We put that on that little stone, just so people could walk up and see what this guy actually went through,” says Ball. 

But Ball was far from done. He knew there were others like his great-great grandfather.  Paper records at Greenlawn Cemetery in Columbus, the second largest in the state, show there are 300 Civil War Veterans who never received a government marker. As a member of Sons of Union Veterans of the Civil War, Ball says it is the group’s obligation to keep the memory of those men alive.

“As we go through these cemeteries, we get involved with them. We find broken head stones. We find headstones that are illegible. And then of course you find a lot of soldiers who never received their markers from the government. And it is now our big project, our obligation to try to replace as many of those as we can and the in the first place, to even get them, that have never even been there,” says Ball. 

Ball and the Sons of Union Veterans of the Civil War have now placed headstones on the final resting place of a dozen Union soldiers. For them, it’s a labor of love and duty.

“Identify a day, get a large group together and then do cleanings. We work with a product called D2, it’s an environmentally friendly, very good for softer stones such as marble because we can't do a power washing. And then we'll hand scrub them,” says Memorial Properties Ohio President, Kyle Nikola. 

What started as a personal mission for Steve Ball, has become a broader effort to honor the others who answered the call of duty.

“I'm very, very glad. I'm very proud of that, that we finally got that done,” says Ball. 

Greenlawn Cemetery is accepting donations for the time and labor it takes to set the new headstones. They’re located at 1000 Greenlawn Ave in Columbus.