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FeedMoving Isaac
Twenty years after his death, a local war hero helped lead one final charge.
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Americans love celebrities—and if the celebrities are dead, well, that hardly matters. If it were otherwise, nobody would visit Ben Franklin’s grave, tour Elvis’ Graceland or gawk at the former Hollywood mansions of Marilyn Monroe, Frank Sinatra and Humphrey Bogart.
In the 1850s, civic leaders in West Chester recruited a local dead celebrity—Maj. Isaac D. Barnard, a hero of the War of 1812—to help persuade locals to bury their dead at Oaklands, a new cemetery on the borough’s northern outskirts. Barnard’s bones were removed from an unmarked grave at a Quaker burial ground and re-buried with great fanfare at Oaklands.
“Since Barnard had left no immediate family to object to the removal, it was a done deal,” wrote West Chester historian Douglas R. Harper.
The event was a signal that, for dead West Chestrians, Oaklands was the place to be. Sales took off at the new cemetery in the wake of Barnard’s relocation. Over the next few years, many families disinterred their dead from the town’s old burial grounds and moved them to family lots at Oaklands. Today, those former burial grounds are covered with houses.
Born in Delaware County, Barnard spent his youth on a farm near Chester, where his father served as sheriff at the county seat. In 1800, James Barnard was appointed clerk of the county court, and the family moved to the borough. Young Isaac quit school at 13 to clerk in his father’s office. After his father’s death, Barnard continued clerking until 1811, when he began to study law.
In March 1812, Barnard received a captain’s commission in the 14th U.S. Infantry. Anticipating war with Great Britain, the federal government was increasing the size of its army. Barnard’s first assignment was to go to West Chester and enlist 70 men.
The War of 1812 was not popular in the Northeast. War meant a virtual shut-down of international trade, which hurt bankers, manufacturers and ship owners, of which the Philadelphia area had more than its share. So, Barnard’s placement of ads in the Chester & Delaware Federalist newspaper headlined “Soldiers? Soldiers?” got some notice—and, apparently, not all in a good way.
“The war was entered into by the persons in power more for the sake of supporting the tottering and declining popularity of [their party] than from patriotic views,” wrote the paper’s editor.
But he refrained from blaming Barnard who, he conceded, hadn’t used deceitful recruiting tactics and did not flog those he signed. In the end, Barnard got his 70.
In 1813, Barnard was present at the Battle of Fort George, in which U.S. troops captured a British fort on the western shore of Lake Ontario. Things went less well at the subsequent Battle of Beaver Dams, in which a portion of Barnard’s regiment and most of its officers were captured. That left him in command of what remained of the unit—and promoted to major.
In the highlight of his military career, at the Battle of Lyon’s Creek near Niagara Falls, Barnard led 900 Americans in a frontal assault against 1,200 British grenadiers, who fled. “All did their duty,” reported Barnard’s commanding officer. “But the handsome manner in which Maj. Barnard brought his regiment into action deserves particular notice.”
