Category Archives: Announcement

On Veterans Day in 2018, the Brunswick County World War I Monument was dedicated at the site of the 1918 Fort Caswell Rifle Range, a nationally designated World War I Centennial Memorial. The Roll Call began that day to honor the 718 men and one nurse from Brunswick County who served in World War I.

Five years have passed since the Roll Call began, the completion delayed by the pandemic.

On April 4, 2023, the mission of honoring all WWI veterans from Brunswick County was completed with the calling of the final group of names.

View the Brunswick County WWI Veteran Roll of Honor to discover the date each veteran was honored during a ceremony at the Fort Caswell Rifle Range.

To view more details about the veterans, view the complete Brunswick County WWI Veteran list.

Stay tuned for more information about the completed mission.

Photo above: Veteran Fred “Stan” Stanley reading the Roll Call on Veterans Day 2019. His grandfather, WWI Veteran Robert Bollie Stanley, was the only WWI POW from Brunswick County. His family was honored during the 2019 ceremony.

Photo courtesy of Phyllis Wilson.

The first WWI Snapshots were posted on the blog in September 2019. These were created to preserve some of the valuable information obtained about the veterans.

WWI Profiles, on the other hand, were written primarily for those veterans who died or were wounded while in service. The profiles included many more details. Historical documents about their divisions were used to approximate the activity and location of their unit during their injuries or death. Grouping veterans in the same division resulted in a nearly complete description of their division from beginning to end.

The Published WWI Profiles webpage lists the links for all of the WWI Profiles and WWI Snapshots posted on the website and published in local newspapers.

Nearly all of the profiles and snapshots published on the blog through 2020 are included in our book published in 2020, Brunswick County in the Great War: Preserving the 1918 Fort Caswell Rifle Range and the Legacies of the Men and Women Who Served.

To order your own book, call or contact The Friends now as shown below (click to enlarge), or use the Purchase a Book link.

As readers may have noticed and the Published WWI Profiles webpage shows, WWI Snapshots resumed in January 2021. These snapshots were written after Brunswick County in the Great War was published. While continuing the focus on preserving unique information about Brunswick County’s WWI veterans, an additional focus is to honor those veterans who have not been honored with military headstones or flat markers or simply have no cemetery or gravesite identified.

Next week, Black History Month begins. Only those snapshots written for our Black WWI veterans will be posted during the month of February. There are many African American WWI veterans buried in graves that are no longer marked. Death certificates are used to identify the name of the cemetery.

Overall, we have many WWI veterans with no military honors displayed at their gravesite. You can identify them on the WWI Brunswick County Veteran list, which is also accessible by the blue button on the top right of the webpage. Those with two asterisks (**) after their date of death indicates that no military honors were found, and a question mark (?) indicates that no photo was found of their gravesite to confirm, or that their gravesite could not be located.

If anyone would like to share more information about a veteran for a snapshot, or contribute to the effort to identify the dates of death and cemetery locations, please contact the Friends of Fort Caswell Rifle Range. Thank you!

Note: This is not a fundraiser. The price of the books was chosen to cover the publishing and printing costs.