Tales from the road: A Gettysburg Medal of Honor recipient in my hometown

Casper R. Carlisle's gravestone in Mount Lebanon (Pa.) Cemetery.

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It’s as hot as the devil’s armpit here in my hometown of Mount Lebanon, a suburb of Pittsburgh, but I’m game for a walk uptown anyway. I follow an oh-so-familiar route, passing the former penny candy store I knew so well as a kid, a cobblestone lane and stately 1940s-era apartment buildings.

Caretaker Mike Marrone with
his binder of information
on veterans buried at
Mount Lebanon (Pa.) Cemetery.

Finally, mercifully, I reach the town cemetery, best known to my pals and me as the shortcut to the other side of town.

Inside the cemetery office, I meet soft-spoken Mike Marrone, 60, who has spent the past 23 years as one of the cemetery’s caretakers. He and his wife are the cemetery’s longest-tenured employees. A fan of the movie Gettysburg, Marrone watches the 1993 film once a year.

“Jeff Daniels was great,” he says of the actor who portrayed Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain.

Marrone lives in West Homestead, near Kennywood Park — home of the epic (and delightfully rickety) Thunderbolt wooden roller coaster. But I’m not interested in amusement park rides; I’m here to explore the cemetery’s Civil War connections.

Oh my, have I found the right man for the job.

Marrone heads upstairs and returns with a thick binder containing biographies of veterans buried in the cemetery. He has compiled it over the years — a gift to visitors.

He flips to a page on Casper Carlisle, a private in Independent Battery F, Pennsylvania Volunteer Light Artillery.

“What did he do?” I ask.

“He won the Medal of Honor.”

My God, I had no idea. A Medal of Honor recipient buried in my hometown.

Flowers and an American flag adorn Casper R. Carlisle's marker. He died in 1908.

According to Carlisle’s Medal of Honor citation, while fighting in Gettysburg’s Peach Orchard on July 2, 1863, he “saved a gun of his battery under heavy musketry fire, most of the horses being killed and the drivers wounded.” He was only 21 or 22.

“I need to make sure the grass is cut at his grave for the next three days,” Marrone says, keenly aware of the anniversary of the Battle of Gettysburg.

He hands me a map and points to No. 7 — Carlisle’s grave. I take a circuitous route but eventually find it in the shadow of St. Bernard’s Catholic Church.

Four minty U.S. flags and bouquets of flowers adorn a marker for Carlisle, who, according to one account, died a pauper in 1908.

It’s nice to see a hero remembered.

And it’s terrific to meet a caretaker who helps make sure he never is forgotten.