Class of 1897

Regarding our classmate, Henry S. Morgan, the Army Register for 1899, p296, has the brief note "2d Lieutenant, Corps of Engineers, drowned in Tyler Roads, Georgia, August 31, 1898." Morgan was in charge of fortification work at Fort Screven, Georgia. During a hurricane, a Norwegian bark was sinking off the fort. Morgan volunteered to go in a small boat to try to rescue the crew. The boat was capsized and Morgan was drowned. Efforts to recover his body were not success­ful until fifteen years later. A man from Valdosta, Georgia, Morgan's home town, was hunting on Warsaw Island when a negro told him that some months after the great hurricane of August 31, 1898, the body of "a very tall man" was washed ashore there and buried. Morgan was over •six feet four inches. The body was exhumed and identified by West Point buttons on a rain coat, and was buried in the family lot at Valdosta.

The class put up a monument to Morgan at Fort Screven. That reservation was recently sold to civilians, and Altstaetter found that the monument was being neglected. Through his efforts the Savannah Post, Society of American Military Engineers, arranged for the removal of the monument to Fort Pulaski, which is retained as a National Monument under the National Park Service.

A suitable dedicatory ceremony was held in May 1940, at which Altstaetter made an address. It should be noted that our class president personally reimbursed the Savannah Post for the expenses incident to the removal of the monument.