Historical Portrait
[Civil War veteran Private William Washington Nixon of Co. I, 2nd Pennsylvania Heavy Artillery Regiment wearing badges giving nurse Alice Cary Risley a kiss on her forehead at G.A.R. reunion in Washin
Archive record
1 photograph : gelatin silver print ; sheet 247 x 206 mm. | Photograph shows portrait of Union veteran and nurse.
About this photograph
This photograph from 1936 shows Private William Washington Nixon of Company I, 2nd Pennsylvania Heavy Artillery Regiment kissing the forehead of nurse Alice Cary Risley at a Grand Army of the Republic reunion in Washington.
By 1936, the surviving Union veterans were in their nineties, and reunions had become occasions for documenting the last generation who had lived through the war. The Grand Army of the Republic was the fraternal organisation of Union veterans, founded in 1866. Its local posts ran reunions and memorial observances for decades after the war, and members wore distinctive uniforms and badges to encampments and parades.
The photograph captures an intimate moment between two elderly people whose connection evidently reached back to the war itself. Nixon wears the G.A.R. badges mentioned in the record. The image belongs to a late phase of Civil War commemoration, when the focus had shifted from the conflict itself to the aging survivors and the bonds formed during it. Within twenty years the organisation would dissolve when its last member died.
Compiled from the catalogue record and reference notes on the formats and events involved. The archive record above is the primary source.
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