Welcome to
Grand Army of the Republic Cemetery Park
The following information is available thanks to the incredible research done by
Jaqueline Lawrence and Cynthia Wilson.
Gilford P. Hervey’s life, though the information we have about it is somewhat scarce, reflects some of the experiences of Black Americans before, during, and after the Civil War.
Born into slavery in North Carolina, Gilford P. Hervey, along with his parents and 13 siblings, were enslaved by a man named Gideon T. Hervey. Gilford Hervey and his family were at one time forcibly moved to Mississippi with their enslavers. In 1863, President Abraham Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation, which allowed Black men to enlist in the Union Army and provided a path towards freedom. In June of 1863, Gilford and his older brother Thomas enlisted in the 59th US Colored Infantry, where they were under the command of Colonel Edward Bouton. Though the Emancipation Proclamation did grant Black Americans a basic right, Black soldiers were still discriminated against in the military. They were paid less, and were often forced to do menial camp labor, sometimes being kept from combat. The Hervey brothers experienced several significant battles during their time in the Union Army, namely the Battle of Brice’s Cross Roads and Major General Nathan Bedford Forrest’s attack on Memphis, Tennessee. Both Thomas and Gilford were injured, and received pensions after the conclusion of their service in 1866.
107th U.S. Colored Infantry, 1865.
Image property of the Library of Congress.
After the war, Gilford Hervey was now a free man and made his way to Illinois, where he ran a boarding house. He married his first wife, Francis McLane in 1864, who he eventually divorced. As Jaqueline Lawson and Cynthia Wilson, the two researchers responsible for uncovering the truths of Hervey’s life, described it to The Seattle Post-Intelligencer, “his marital life continuously changed, as he married, divorced, remarried, widowed and or/divorced, leaving ex-wives in Tennessee, Illinois, Kansas, Indiana, and Washington." He seems to have held a number of different jobs in these various different states, including being a preacher, baker, grocer, and more. A participant in the Great Migration of the early 1900s, Hervey joined the ranks of Black Americans drawn out of the South and Eastern United States and into larger cities by the promise of new industrial opportunities. Seattle was among the cities witnessing a surge in its Black population during this period.
A family arriving in Chicago, 1910s.
Image property of the University of Washington Special Collections.
Hervey lived in Seattle for five years, then was admitted to a mental hospital in the city of Sedro-Wooley for unknown reasons. He died there on September 8th, 1920. Though we do not have much information about Gilford Hervey, the fact we know anything about him at all is thanks to Cynthia Wilson and Jaqueline Lawson, who have undertaken significant initiatives to research Black genealogy in Seattle. In tracing Hervey’s life, Lawson even discovered that she and Hervey may be distantly related.
Cynthia Wilson (left) and Jacqueline Lawson (right) at Gilford Hervey's gravesite in 2004.
Photo by Karen Ducey, The Seattle Post-Intelligencer, 2004.
Tracing Black genealogy can challenging due to the way slavery, segregation, and racism affected the ways records were kept, but it's because of the amazing work done by researchers like Cynthia Wilson and Jaqueline Lawson that more Black stories from American history, like that of Gilford Hervey’s, continue to come into light.