CHAPTER 6: History From 2 Directions


The answer to the caller's question - which came seemingly out of the blue - was simple.

"Yes, we have a Cheesecake Cemetery here," Jim Kemp said into the telephone early one morning in January.

Kemp, in fact, knew the cemetery well.

Since the summer of 2002, Kemp had been public affairs officer at Yorktown Naval Weapons Station. He was often called upon by local historical societies to give tours of the old burial grounds.

In the years after the Civil War, freed slaves and American Indians had settled on the land that the Navy now owns.

The ruins of their old churches and their associated cemeteries became Navy property in 1918, when the land was turned into a mine depot and later a weapons station.

Cheesecake Cemetery - the name comes from a mispronunciation of the name of the Indian village Kiskiak - was associated with St. John's Baptist Church.

But what did the caller, who identified himself as a member of the Medal of Honor Historical Society, want with Cheesecake?

The stranger on the other end, Don Morfe from Baltimore, told Kemp that through his research, he'd learned that a man named Edward Ratcliff was buried there.

"Edward Ratcliff is a Medal of Honor recipient," Morfe told Kemp.

It was his understanding that Ratcliff didn't have a proper tombstone - a Medal of Honor tombstone - marking his grave. Morfe said he wanted to change that.

Kemp had seen the very few headstones left in the old cemetery. Most of them were faded with age. On some, the names were barely legible. And there was no stone for an Edward Ratcliff, as Morfe had suggested.

But Kemp was intrigued.

"I first started thinking about how I could prove this," he said. "I talked to another employee on the base who knows a lot of the history here. He actually took it upon himself and drove to Richmond and came back with copies of Mr. Ratcliff's death certificate."

Written on it, clear as day, was that Ratcliff was buried at "Chescake Cemetery" in Lackey, Va.

Lackey is the area of York County just outside the base.

And Cheesecake, as the cemetery is now called, is within the weapons station.

"Oh, my God," Kemp recalls thinking. "This is perfect. This is the proof."

Kemp got back in touch with Morfe, and together, they filed the Department of Veterans Affairs application for an official military headstone.

As he waited for the stone to arrive, Kemp - a retired military man himself - decided that simply installing the stone wouldn't be enough.

"We needed to at least have a memorial service," he said. "With all the history around here, I knew there had to be some re-enactors in the area."

Kemp found the 38th Regiment of the U.S. Colored Troops - the unit that Edward Ratcliff fought with - in Richmond.

"They said they would love to participate."

He also got in touch with present-day St. John's Baptist Church, which relocated to Williamsburg after the Navy moved in.

"I wanted to invite the pastor and the congregation, since it was the church Mr. Ratcliff belonged to."

They were thrilled with the invitation, Kemp said, but "they told me they were already planning a memorial at the church."

Wes Wilson, a Civil War re-enactor and amateur historian from Gloucester, had organized the memorial after being told by Kemp's predecessor that nothing could be done on the base.

"I talked to Wilson," Kemp said.

"He said they would go ahead and cancel it over there. He was just thrilled with what we were doing."

Kemp then started wondering whether any of Ratcliff's descendants still lived in the area.

"I knew of some Radcliffes, so I asked various people if they knew if there were any descendants around. I talked to church members and pastors. I talked to people who live around here."

A couple of people mentioned that one man might know something. They said they'd ask him to call.

One day this past spring, Kemp arrived at work and found a puzzling phone message left for him.

All it said was "This is Edward Radcliffe." And the man left his phone number.

"How could that be?" Kemp recalls thinking.

It was the first time that he'd heard the name other than in the context of a man buried at the weapons station.

"I thought someone was playing a joke on me."

Kemp called the number.

The man was Edward Ratcliff's grandson, 84-year-old Edward Radcliffe, as the name is now spelled.

He lived in James City County, and his father, Charles, was one of Edward Ratcliff's children.

Everyone in the family knew of their ancestor's medal, but no one had been to the cemetery in decades, partly because of security restrictions on the base.

Over the years, much of the family had dispersed, settling along the East Coast.

Some descendants, though, including Edward, still lived in Hampton Roads.

"Talking to him almost brought me to tears," Kemp said. "It was just really emotional that we found somebody."

Kemp ended that first conversation quickly.

"I was getting so emotional on the phone," he said. "Here we have one of the U.S. Colored Troops who during the Civil War didn't get the recognition they should have.

"On top of that, the soldier was a Medal of Honor recipient."

The two men vowed to keep in touch. Kemp would get details of the ceremony approved through the family from then on, and Radcliffe would get in touch with his daughter-in-law.

She'd been spending a lot of time researching the family, trying to get more information on how the old soldier came to be buried at Cheesecake. Tomorrow: A soldier's return

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