World War I Veterans

Tucked in the briery woods off of Hick’s Wharf Road, a dozen or so gravestones stand as testament to the lives of my third great grandparents, Richard (1785-1851) and Pricilla (1786-1850) Foster, and others. The small graveyard on land once part of their plantation, spanning a few hundred acres, is today surrounded by private property. On a visit to the graveyard last summer, to show the family plot to a couple of North Carolina cousins, I stopped to ponder some nearby graves I had never paid attention to before: the 20th-century graves of people who were quite possibly the descendants of enslaved people who worked for the Fosters.

I was particularly intrigued by the marker for John Harvey Ruff (29 May 1895 – 23 Jan 1955) of Bohannon, who had served as a private in Company D of the 367th Infantry during World War I. He was my paternal grandfather’s contemporary: Frank Raymond Lewis, Sr. (22 November 1894 – 11 December 1959) of Hudgins was also a veteran of the First World War. They both spent the best part of a year of their lives on the Western Front. 

According to his records, Papa enlisted in the U.S. Army’s Coast Artillery Corps on 2 May 1917, a month before men between the ages of 21 and 30 were required to register for the draft. He was overseas from 22 March 1918 to 16 March 1919, leaving with Battery F of the 54th CAC, which reorganized several times while on the Western Front. When he was part of the 44th Artillery, the Americans used British 8-inch Howitzers as their weapon.  He fought in the Battle of Saint Mihiel, the first U.S. led offensive of World War I, and in the Lorraine Sector.

I looked up John Ruff’s group and found that the 367th Infantry was part of Pershing’s American ExpeditionaryForce on the Western Front too. He and Papa were within a few miles of one another while their units moved around Alsace-Lorraine. The 367th Infantry, 92nd Division, shipped out in early June 1918 and came back in March 1919. The 92nd (Buffalo Soldiers)  and 93rd (Blue Helmets) Divisions were the only African American troops involved in World War I, and when the 92nd arrived in France, Pershing assigned them to fight under French commanders. The Division engaged in 67 days of battle in three major sectors against the Germans: St. Die (28 days), Meuse-Argonne  (7 days), and Marbache (32 days).

Within a few months following the Armistice, both men were sent to Camp Meade, Maryland, for demobilization. They were two Mathews men among two million Americans to enter the war that had broken out in 1914, about which America had wished to remain neutral. In Mathews County,Virginia: Lost Landscapes, Untold Stories, I learned that 33 Mathews men joined the military within four weeks after the war began, although 620 were eligible. When the draft age was broadened to include men from 18 to 45 years of age in September 1918, 945 more Mathews men signed up for the draft.

Since military history is not the point of this blog, I have included lots of links above for those who want to know more. Quite frankly, my lack of military knowledge has stopped me from posting sooner. I looked at plenty of websites and watched a few movies too. They reinforced my feelings of sadness about the horrors of war and what it must do to soldiers. 

I don’t know if his service led my grandfather to take his own life years later, but I imagine that firing Howitzers from muddy trenches didn’t help. John Ruff never married. He worked as an oysterman and in the seafood industry until his death from heart disease. He also lived a long time after his service, but I imagine time spent in those muddy trenches could have contributed to unhappiness for him, too. Of course, as a Black man, Ruff came home to contend with the terror of the Jim Crow South. Martha McCartney’s book reports that many blacks left the county after the war. This makes me remember riding in the car with my family in the late 1950s or early 1960s, passing a KKK gathering in a Mathews field. A bonfire or cross burning was lighting up the night sky.

In 1891, a son of Richard and Priscilla Foster (and several times great uncle of mine), Daniel Hall Foster Sr. (1824-1894), sold land from the Foster estate, over which he was the administrator, to Nancy Ruff and children. There were nine children, according to the 1880 census, and she would have been John Ruff’s grandmother. Cornelius Ruff (born about 1860) and Sallie B. Ransom (born about 1865) were John’s parents. I don’t know if Nancy Ruff’s property is now the land around the graveyard where Richard, Priscilla and John were laid to rest, but it does currently belong to a member of the Ruff family, according to the Mathews County GIS system. While some members of the Ruff family still live in the Bohannon area, several of the Ruff clan, including John, moved to Phoebus and worked in the seafood business there. On the website FindaGrave.com, the family plot is referenced as the Ruff-Foster graveyard.

Most interesting to me in the census records is that fact that the Ruffs are classified as Mulattoes, or persons of mixed Black and White ancestry, in the 19th century census records. By 1900, the racial classification “Mulatto” disappears and individuals are deemed either Black or White. I wonder if the Ruffs are my Black cousins too.

I wondered one more thing during my preparation to write this post: how about the rest of my Mathews family? Were there other World War I veterans? Even though the war was unpopular at first, nearly all men between the ages of 18 and 45 registered during the years the draft was implemented, about 23% of the U.S. population.

Of my Foster uncles who lived in the Bohannon area, only three were of draft age and only one, the youngest and single brother, served: Alonzo Finch Foster (1988-1952). He was in the Navy, and their most significant contribution to the war was to transport two million U.S. soldiers to Europe. By the summer of 1918, about 10,000 troops per day were arriving in France. The overwhelming numbers of troops that kept coming are believed to be the reason why the German High Command realized they could not win the war and agreed to the Armistice. McCartney wrote, "When Virginia's governor Henry C. Stuart called for recruits for the navy, six Mathews men, all experienced seamen and navigators, enlisted for patrol duty." Perhaps Uncle Lonnie was one of the six, and he certainly hailed from a seagoing family. But he did not continue the seafaring life: he became an accountant in the D.C. area and is buried at Arlington National Cemetery.

My Grandpa Jones and two of his brothers, all of North, registered for the draft as required. None were called up. Grandpa was the youngest, but he was married with one child and asked for an exemption. All of the Jones men were farmers and the sole means of support for their families. A result of the war and twentieth-century progress was that farming would change, so many self-sufficient farms like theirs would disappear, and more people would leave Mathews County.

None of my Papa Lewis’s brothers were called up either. In their case, those brothers who were eligible were lighthouse keepers, so were already doing their bit to watch for German U-boats.

I also looked for other Ruffs who registered for the draft, and there were three. However, neither of them was called up, as far as I can tell. John was the only person with the surname Ruff in the 92nd division. Again, all of the other Ruff men were sole supporters of their families. I believe that two of the three were John’s older brothers.

Papa and John Ruff were single and childless at the time they enlisted and registered for the World War I. And so they went abroad. While their experience as men of different races was real, their experiences as men in such a dangerous place were similar to the others of the two million American men on the Western Front. They both experienced Alsace-Lorraine, a place I’d love to visit someday to reflect on them. If you click on nothing else in this post, take a minute to look at these stunning and moving photographs of the fading battlefields of World War I. I am speechless to say how many ways these soldiers lives and ours are changed by the “War to End All Wars” and the ripples it sent through time.