Amid the rows of American flags and U.S. military branch pendants stretching across Gray Village Cemetery, one grave stands out. The marker, flanked by the Confederate battle flag and the national “Stars and Bars” flag of the short-lived Confederate States of America, is marked simply as, “Stranger.”
The presence of a Confederate burial in Maine, about 500 miles from the Mason-Dixon line, can be traced to a case of mistaken identity.
In 1862, Lt. Charles H. Colley, of the 10th Maine Volunteers, was shot in the knee at the Battle of Cedar Mountain. Colley died from his infected wounds in Alexandria about a month later.
At the time, families of a deceased soldier could pay the government to embalm a soldier’s body and transport the remains to their hometown. Colley’s parents, Amos and Sarah Nash Colley, did so, and by late fall, the coffin arrived in Gray from Virginia. However, when the casket was opened, the family discovered it wasn’t their son, but rather an unidentified Confederate soldier.
Attempts to contact the War Department about the error were unsuccessful due to the unreliability of communications and the lack of procedure for transferring the remains of enemy soldiers. The Ladies of Gray, a group made up the mothers of dead, wounded or missing soldiers, took it upon themselves to bury the soldier far from home, in a town that proportionally sent more men to war than any other community in Maine.
More than 160 years after the end of the war, the identity of the “Stranger,” as he has come to be called by residents, one of seven Confederate soldiers buried in Maine, remains a mystery. Over the centuries, local historians have speculated on the reasons for the mix-up, raising the possibility that Colley and his southern counterpart may have been wounded, and later died, in close proximity to each other. Others believe the error might have happened because the two shared the same last name. Becky Lee, a member of Gray’s Cemetery Association, said no requests have been made to exhume the body and definitively prove his identity.
The identity of the body under the tombstone of Charles Colley, located near that of the “stranger,” has also been called into question in recent years. In 2015, Mark Faunce, a distant relative of Colley, discovered a record indicating that Colley was buried at Alexandria National Cemetery in Virginia. Debi Curry, a member of the town’s historical society, began communicating with Alexandria, and found no evidence to suggest his body was ever exhumed to be buried in Maine.
Regardless of the true identities of the “Stranger” and the man he was mistaken for, residents of Gray honor the village cemetery’s most mysterious resident, even as the contentious legacy of the Confederacy has been re-examined in recent years.
This year marks the 70th anniversary of a Memorial Day tradition in which residents pay tribute to the “Stranger” by placing Confederate flags next to his tomb. The first two flags were sent by residents of Virginia and South Carolina, who first heard of the story from a news dispatch. A contemporary news article also mentions a letter sent to the town mentioning that, coincidentally, a Union soldier is buried in the town of Gray, Georgia.
In addition, there is a newer tradition in which members of the local American Legion Post dress as soldiers from the 15th Alabama Regiment to pay tribute to the “Stranger.” American Legion Post 86 commander Clyde Morrison said the commemoration, which has not historically drawn as big of a crowd as the Memorial Day Parade taking place earlier in the day, will occur at 1:30 p.m., and feature five reenactors.
This story was originally published by the Maine Trust for Local News. Rory Sweeting can be reached at [email protected].
