A soldier's skeleton and a tragic love story

In March of 1893, a miner by the name of Martin was sent by a group of land speculators to inspect the abandoned Myra & Culbertson ore mine in Plain Grove Township, Lawrence County, in order to make an examination of the quality and quantity of remaining ore, which the owners of a local railroad planned to extract. What Mr. Martin found, however, was the solution to a western Pennsylvania mystery dating back to the days of the Civil War.

Martin, working under the direction of the Western New York & Pennsylvania Railroad, was called upon to look for mineral deposits on the railroad's proposed line between Eastbrook and Ellwood City. He was particularly fascinated with the old Myra & Culbertson mine, a few miles west of Slippery Rock. The mine had opened sometime in the 1850s, but was abandoned a few decades later when the ore became too difficult and expensive to extract. With new mechanical and technological advances, however, the railroad believed that it was now possible to work the mine profitably, and so Mr. Martin and his son Edward went to have a look.

The mine had been abandoned for so long that when Martin and his son arrived, on the morning of Friday, March 3, the entrance was nearly undetectable. After locating an opening, the men crawled on their hands and knees for about 600 feet until they reached a large chamber. Martin raised his lantern and, much to his horror, his light fell upon a human skeleton sitting on a ledge, chained to a post.

"The flesh was dried to the bones, which were intact, and the awful spectacle so overcame me that my first impulse was to run, which I started to do," said Martin to the Pittsburgh Daily Post. "But on second thought I stopped, called to my son, who was some distance behind me, and when he came up we re-entered the chamber together. Beside the skeleton lay the rust-eaten barrel and the crumbling stock of an old gun, evidently an old time musket.

"When I touched the chain that held the skeleton to the post the links fell apart, and the ghastly frame toppled over and fell to the floor of the mine. The incident startled us... we wanted to get out into the open air again as soon as possible."

After scrambling out of the mine the two men went into town to report their discovery, and an old farmer related the sad story of a heartbroken young soldier named John Baird.

In 1861, when Captain Samuel Bentley issued a call for volunteers to fight the Confederacy, John Baird of the tiny Worth Township village of Jacksville was among the first to enlist, leaving his bride of a few months behind to keep the home fires burning. Like many soldiers and supporters of the Union, Baird believed that the fighting would be over in the blink of an eye. But as the weeks stretched into months and the war showed no signs of coming to an end, the young private's spirits began to fall. But he soldiered on, because that is what soldiers do, and before long a year had come and gone. It was a miserable life, the painful monotony of long marches in cheap boots broken only by bloody spasms of ferocious, desperate fighting. Only the letters from his wife made his existence tolerable.

Then, one day, John received a letter from Jacksville, but it was not written by his lover's hand. The letter informed him that his wife was dying of consumption. John obtained a furlough and raced back to Worth Township, but it was too late-- he got there just in time only to see her coffin being lowered into the ground.

During his year of military life John had seen more dying than any man ought to be allowed to see in a lifetime, but nothing he had endured on the field of battle steeled him enough to accept the death of his beloved wife. Yet he put on a brave face, and after the funeral he grabbed his musket and left town, telling his friends and neighbors that he was going back to the front.

The war eventually came to an end but John Baird failed to return home. His friends and relatives made inquiries, but were informed by the army that the young private never came back from his furlough. The military authorities, believing that John was a deserter, had made an exhaustive search, but no trace of the missing soldier was ever found.

The locals put all of the pieces of the puzzle together, revealing the sad story of John Baird's final days. Baird, overcome with grief, was determined to join his wife on the other side. After chaining himself to a post to ensure that he could not change his mind, he waited for the cold embrace of death, hundreds of feet beneath the earth, in a lonely spot where he knew that his cries for help could not be heard.

While it could not be conclusively proven that the skeleton found by Mr. Martin and his son inside the abandoned Myra & Culbertson mine was that of the lost soldier, the facts seemed convincing enough, and on March 6, 1893, the bones were taken from the mine and buried in a grave alongside his wife at the old Jacksville graveyard.




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