HESPERUS – Pvt. Peter Norris, 40th Regiment, Kentucky Volunteer Infantry, received belated recognition Friday for service to the Union during the Civil War.

A headstone was placed on the grave of Norris, whose remains have lain in the Hay Gulch Cemetery here since January 1904, when he died in a house fire. The stone replaces aging grave head and foot markers.

Linley Leonard, a retired Navy man who performs about 40 honor-guard chaplain services annually in the Four Corners, said a prayer.

He and Jesse Kendrick, the Navy recruiter in Durango, were decked out in their dress whites. Kendrick led the folding of an American flag into the shape of the tri-cornered hat worn by colonial soldiers.

Kendrick presented the flag to Bruce Crawford, a local resident whose great-grandfather John Marion Crawford married Peter Norris’ sister Isadora.

A dozen members of the Crawford clan, including matriarch Patricia Crawford Moore, who came from Rio Rancho, N.M., watched.

The Hay Gulch Cemetery, which is enclosed by a wire mesh fence, sits out of sight above County Road 120 west of Colorado Highway 140. The graves of 14 people, including John Marion Crawford and his wife, are scattered among scrub oak and junipers.

The cemetery property is owned by the state.

“A few in the cemetery aren’t family,” Bruce Crawford said. “But most of them are relatives.”

Norris, who escaped Confederate bullets and rampant diseases such as dysentery, typhoid, pneumonia and tuberculosis that felled thousands of Civil War combatants, died Jan. 7, 1904, when a fire gutted his sister’s house.

A nephew was badly burned.

Fast forwarding: Cortez resident Jim Davenport, grave registration officer for the Durango “camp” of the Sons of Union Veterans of the Civil War, contacted Bruce Crawford when he found the Norris grave and made arrangements for a headstone through the Veterans Administration.

He has discovered graves of Civil War veterans in California, Illinois and Texas as well as in the Four Corners.

“We document the graves of Confederate soldiers, too,” said Davenport, who also serves on the national grave-registation committee of the organization, created in 1881.

About the same time, Jeanne Matthews, who works with Crawford’s wife, Sharon, at the Durango & Silverton Narrow Gauge Railroad, found Norris’ grave listed online at wwww.coloradogravestones.com.

Matthews, whose father died a couple of years ago, said her involvement with locating graves is therapeutic.

Because her family background was Navy, Matthews turned to that branch of the military to ask about a memorial service.

She also called Family Craft Memorials of Durango, which sized the headstone and installed it Friday free of charge.

Gail Meyer Kilgore of Lake County founded Trails to the Past about 18 months ago to send volunteers to cemeteries to photograph and collect headstone information.

The data goes online at www.coloradogravestones.com as a source for genealogical researchers and people searching for ancestors, Kilgore said by telephone.

Public and family records, which contain discrepancies, show that Norris was born in 1843, 1844 or 1845 in Virginia, the fourth of nine children. The birth date on the new headstone is 1843.

Norris enlisted in the 40th Regiment of the Kentucky Volunteer Infantry in August or September of 1863. He was assigned to Company C.

The regiment was active from July 1863 until the end of December 1864. Nine of the regiment’s enlisted men were killed or mortally wounded. Two officers and 91 enlisted men died of disease.

After the war, Norris lived in Kentucky with sister Isadora, about 10 years his junior. In the 1870 census, he listed his occupation as coal miner.

After Isadora married J.M. Crawford, Norris moved with the couple to Hesperus.

A Jan. 8, 1904, story in the Durango Democrat newspaper said Norris was overcome the day before by flames and smoke from a pre-dawn fire that started in a fireplace beneath the second-story bedroom where he slept. The date of death on the headstone is Jan. 6, 1904.

Isadora Crawford pulled her son, Allen, from the inferno, but his hands were badly burned.

So little of Norris’ body was recovered that the remains were buried in an infant’s coffin, the newspaper reported.

daler@durangoherald.com