The Civil War and Lower Town

The Civil War and Lower Town. . While neighbors in Ann Arbor were divided over abolition, many residents of Lower Town were active in the Underground Railroad and in the anti-slavery and abolitionist movements and parties. According to the 1881 History of Washtenaw County, when the Civil War started "none were more patriotic and ready to uphold the standard of a free Republic than the brave citizens of the Fifth Ward.", Enlistments from the area were unusually heavy, 75 out of a district of 140 voters, the largest number from any Ann Arbor city ward. Casualties were severe. Twenty-five bodies were returned to Fairview Cemetery. Sixteen had to be left where they fell. The forty-one names are those of families well known in early Lower Town history., Starting in 1870, the women of the Fifth Ward banded together to decorate the graves of the dead on Decoration Day, now called Memorial Day. In 1874, a Fifth Ward War Memorial was unveiled in the center of Fairview Cemetery, paid for by a subscription of the mothers, wives, sisters, and friends of the Ladies' Decoration Society., Mrs. Eli Moore, a Quaker and prominent leader in the Fifth Ward, whose father had been a "conductor on the Underground Railroad in his Ypsilanti home, hosted the group at a meeting in her house, originally the home of Anson and Desire Brown. Mrs. Moore described it this way: "There were in the neighborhood a dozen ladies of this ward and the President then was Mrs. N. H. Pierce., The first President of the Society had been Mrs. Fisher, who had lost two sons in the Civil War and whose heart was in the work of raising a monument for the boys in this ward who had given their lives in the cause of freedom to the Slave. Other hearts joined her, and only our Father above knows. the struggle of those years till the monument was placed in Fairview Cemetery.", On the sides of the monument are inscribed the words, , "In memory of the 5th Ward Soldiers who fought for the Union.", "Brave soldiers rest, your strife is o'er and you have gained a sweet release the bugles blast the cannons roar no more shall break your spirits peace."