Juneteenth Hero in Our Midst
I promise that my newsletters will not always be about cemeteries, but I must tell you one more important story originating in another cemetery in Rochester. The Quarry Hill Cemetery is the burial place of two thousand nineteen patients of the former State Hospital. Their graves were unmarked until 2007, when volunteers began placing headstones at all the graves except for forty-nine people who were buried in a location on the property yet to be found.
Like the people buried in Potter’s Field at Oakwood Cemetery, whom I wrote about earlier, those laid to rest here also have stories that deserve to be remembered. William Henry Costley was buried in Quarry Hill Cemetery in 1888. He was a soldier in the Twenty-Ninth Illinois Regiment of US Colored Troops, which marched into Galveston, Texas, on June 19, 1865, to free 200,000 Black people who were still enslaved there two years after the Emancipation Proclamation had been signed and months after Robert E Lee surrendered. William Costley then joined the renowned Buffalo Soldiers. Eventually, he left the military and moved to Minneapolis. He became a patient at the state hospital in Rochester, where he was treated for neurologic disorders, possibly from injuries sustained during his military service.
William Costley’s story is remarkable, and his mother’s courage and persistence are equally admirable. Nance Legins-Costley was held in indentured servitude, a mechanism often used to mask enslavement in free states, in Illinois. She appealed to the young lawyer, Abraham Lincoln, who argued her case for freedom before the Supreme Court of Illinois. When they won the case in 1841, Nance had secured freedom for herself and her three children, including William who was an infant at the time.
For the last few years, my grandchildren, Harper and Heath, and I have left flowers at William Costley’s grave at Quarry Hill around Juneteenth. We do this to honor him and recognize the courage and persistence he and his mother demonstrated in the context of the realities they faced in the 19th century. It is amazing that we are this close to someone who fought for justice in Galveston that day one hundred sixty-one years ago. What happened there is not just a story in a history book, it is part of a man’s life, a man buried here among us. William Costley and the other soldiers of his unit stood up. Nance Legins-Costley stood up. Their actions impacted many lives. Reflecting on their stories gives us an opportunity every year on Juneteenth to find ways to stand up against the injustices of the 21st century.
More information on Juneteenth can be found in “The Historical Legacy of Juneteenth” on the National Museum of African American History and Culture website.
