The Civil War flags of 56 Pownal men are now graced with red, white and blue ribbons, on the 150th anniversary of the end of America’s most deadly internal struggle.

Sherry Dietrich and Mary Ann Hodsdon spent a year researching the names of the town’s Civil War veterans, locating their markers in nine cemeteries and fastening them with the ribbons they made.

The two old friends met in front of Benjamin Hodsdon’s memorial stone at beautifully manicured Elmwood Cemetery last Friday to talk about their endeavor. Benjamin Hodsdon is a great-great-great-great grandfather of Mary Ann Hodsdon’s husband, Ronald.

“We’ve got Civil War veterans in pretty much all of our cemeteries,” Dietrich said. “We just said, ‘How can we commemorate them?’ So Mary Ann and I worked all winter on it.”

They placed the ribbons out this spring.

The Civil War was fought from 1861 to 1865.

Benjamin Hodsdon’s memorial stone includes an inscription honoring his son-in-law, George S. Noyes, who was killed at Gettysburg, the bloodiest battle of the war, which turned momentum decisively in favor of the Union. Mary Ann Hodsdon and Dietrich showed the ribbon they fastened to Noyes’ Civil War marker.

The inscription says that Noyes was killed on July 2, 1863, at the age of 25.

Dietrich said it is not sure if any of the actual bodies of the Pownal soldiers killed in the Civil War are in the Pownal cemeteries.

“They left on trains not knowing what they were getting into,” Hodsdon said.

Dietrich said that she and Hodsdon, aware that the 150th anniversary of the Civil War’s end was approaching, thought about doing something for the town’s fallen soldiers.

“But we didn’t know what we wanted to do,” she said. “They already had the flags. We just decided to single them out with an additional little ribbon. We just had a lot of fun, actually. It was work because we didn’t know who they were at first. We were looking for gravesites. Some of these guys were not ever brought here, because they couldn’t get shipped home from Gettysburg. But they have memorial stones. It was mainly gathering the information for every single veteran that we knew had Pownal connections.”

The gathering of the information through town records, Hodsdon said, was the hard part.

“But it really felt like you were doing something worthwhile,” she said.

Sherry Dietrich, left, and Mary Ann Hodsdon hold up the ribbon they fastened onto the Civil War flag of George S. Noyes, next to the stone marked for his father-in-law, Benjamin Hodsdon, at Elmwood Cemetery in Pownal. Staff photo by Larry GrardMary Ann Hodsdon holds her grandson, Sam Hodsdon, last Friday at Elmwood Cemetery in Pownal. Sam Hodsdon is a six-generation grandson of Benjamin Hodsdon, whose name is inscribed on the headstone. Mary Ann Hodsdon and Sherry Dietrich made ribbons for the markers of Civil War soldiers from Pownal in nine cemeteries. Staff photo by Larry Grard