It was a fall day in 1914 when Sampson Undertakers of Pittsburgh drove an “auto ambulance” through the gates of Butler’s North Side Cemetery.

Armed with shovels, the men dug until their spades struck the top of a coffin holding the remains of a long-dead war hero.

Leaving the ornate headstone in place, the workers loaded the soldier’s remains into the ambulance to be reburied in Pittsburgh. The grave diggers quietly filled in the grave and, to have their work go unnoticed, covered it with the original top layer of grass.

It was eight months later and a few days before Memorial Day in 1915, when members of the local Grand Army of the Republic Post (a Civil War veterans organization) and the soldier’s sisters, who still resided in the family home on North Main Street, discovered they would have one less soldier’s grave to decorate.

The legendary Burger Hut restaurant on Butler’s North Main Street holds many delicious memories for generations of Butler residents. Few people, however, could imagine the tragic echoes of the Civil War behind its brick walls.

The circa-1850 building was once the home of saddle maker George Reed and his family. Six children were raised inside the family residence during a war that would cost the lives of 640,000 men, including the eldest Reed child.

The only clues to a death bed promise made between two of the Reeds’ sons is a name on the carriages supporting the two cannons in Diamond Park identifying the Alfred G. Reed Post of the Grand Army of the Republic and the same name still readable on the original headstone marking a now empty grave.

It was Sept. 19, 1861, when 22-year-old aspiring lawyer Alfred G. Reed exited the front door of his family’s home (the Burger Hut building) on Butler’s High Street (Main Street) and made the short walk south to join 100 of his friends — including my great-grandfather — in front of the Butler County Courthouse to volunteer to serve in Company H, 78th PA Volunteers.

Reed would follow this regiment to Camp Orr in Kittanning and eventually to the Monongahela Wharf in Pittsburgh where six steamboats waited to carry the three regiments of Reed’s newly formed brigade on their journey down the Ohio River and off to war.

But, just days before Alfred boarded for the trip to Louisville, Ky., he married Mary B. Miller in her parents’ home in nearby Millvale. Nine months later their only child, Alfred H. Reed, was born.

Sgt. Alfred G. Reed was in Nashville, Tenn., when he requested a leave of absence to return to Pittsburgh to witness the birth of his son on June 29, 1862. Reed was so enamored by his little boy that he ignored the letters from his commanding officer Col. William Sirwell demanding his return to the 78th.

Most likely in fear of punishment if he returned to Tennessee, Reed joined another regiment in Pittsburgh on Aug. 15, 1862. So, instead of returning to Nashville, the now first lieutenant kissed his wife and baby goodbye for the last time and left for Virginia.

Little could the young family have imagined that Reed was soon to meet his destiny on a Virginia battlefield less than two weeks before his son’s first Christmas.

It was Dec. 13, 1862, when fate introduced itself to the recently promoted adjutant of the 134th PA Volunteer Infantry. Alfred G. Reed was about to receive his baptism of battle with his new regiment while fighting under the inept command of Gen. Ambrose Burnside. The general, whose last name would be transposed to “sideburns” as a nickname for his unique facial hair, planned to cross his army from the north side of the Rappahannock River to break through Robert E. Lee’s well-fortified Army of Northern Virginia on the river’s south side.

One Federal general wrote afterwards of the soon-to-be-disastrous and deadly Union defeat saying “It was a great slaughter pen. They (Burnside’s army) may as well have tried to take hell.”

Reed and the 134th PA Volunteers were about to take part in the most famous part of that battle just south of the town of Fredericksburg. Burnside ordered six main infantry charges across an open field against 3,000 Confederate infantrymen standing in a sunken road behind the length of a 600-yard stone wall at the base of Mayre’s Heights. An additional 3,000 southern troops awaited atop the heights, ready for the Union attacks, with supporting artillery behind them.

Reed had witnessed the five previous charges of brave men who were ordered to their deaths without a single man so much as laying his hand on that stone wall!

The order came just before sundown for the 134th PA Volunteers to be part of this final purposeful act of slaughter by Burnside. Alfred’s regiment was to be the honored regiment in the final charge, meaning it was right in the front line of the brigade as it marched across the open field to assault the Confederates awaiting them with loaded rifles behind the unreachable stone wall.

Moments before the orders to go into battle had been issued, the colonel of Reed’s regiment, Matthew Stanley Quay of Beaver, Pa., had received his discharge papers due to suffering from typhoid fever. Quay begged his brigade commander, who thought Quay fortunate not to have to fight, to allow him to lead his men on horseback with these convincing words, “I would rather die in battle and be called a fool, than to go home and be called a coward.”

As Reed and the rest of the men of the 134th began their ill-fated march toward the Confederate line, they came upon a regiment that had been decimated during the previous assault. The wounded were laying in a little dip in the terrain trying to shield themselves from incoming fire by stacking the bodies of the dead around them. Knowing what awaited the soldiers of this final charge, the wounded began to grab the blue pant legs of the men of Reed’s fresh regiment pleading with them to “go back, go back!”

Quay, on horseback, ordered his men to “March over them, tramp them down.” The bullets from the 3,000 rebels buzzed by the attacking men’s heads like a swarm of bees and cut Quay’s men down as if they were blades of grass.

Quay, who would later receive the Medal of Honor for his actions that day, led his men to within 30 yards of the stone wall. In total during the six assaults, 8,000 Union troops would be hit by enemy fire, while only 300 fighting for the southern army would be struck by the bullets of their northern attackers. The 134th PA Volunteers would suffer roughly 50% casualties that day. Included among the wounded was Alfred G. Reed.

Reed had been shot in the hip by a confederate minié ball and lay wounded among the thousands of others left behind on the battlefield as darkness and the temperature began to fall. The Union army retreated across to the north side of the Rappahannock River leaving the wounded behind. Although 56 degrees during the battle, the night would see the temperature drop very close to the freezing mark causing much suffering among the wounded who had left their heavy wool overcoats behind. The fallen soldiers’ unearthly, painful cries for help pierced the evening sky.

Upon learning of the fate of his regiment’s adjutant and close personal friend Alfred G. Reed, Quay secured a detail of men and with a wagon recrossed the river under the cover of darkness. Most likely by calling out Reed’s name or by turning over the dead and wounded to view their faces, the rescue party eventually found the wounded soldier. Quay, instead of having his friend treated in a crude hospital in the field, had Alfred transported immediately to an Army hospital in Washington, D.C., and sent word back to the Reed family in Butler.

Nelson P. Reed boarded a train shortly after receiving the news and headed for Washington City as it was then called. Arriving at the hospital, Nelson sat by his older brother’s bedside as Alfred slowly grew weaker due to infection or blood loss. Sensing that he would not likely survive, Alfred’s weakened voice called his brother to his side, and pulling him close, Alfred asked Nelson to promise that “You will always be a friend to Colonel Quay for the rest of his life!”

Two days after Christmas in 1862, while his wife and five-month-old son were waiting at home hoping their Christmas prayer for his recovery would be answered, Alfred G. Reed died at the age of 23. Nelson returned to Butler with Alfred’s body and his horse. The family laid their son and brother to rest in Butler’s North Side Cemetery overlooking the town Alfred had called home.

Nelson Reed did not forget the pledge he made to his older brother at the hospital in Washington. In 1866, as part of a partnership, Nelson took over the ownership of the Pittsburgh Gazette and Pittsburgh Commercial newspapers and became its editor and publisher. These two merged papers eventually became the present-day Pittsburgh Post-Gazette in 1927. Taking advantage of the power of the press, he used his newspaper before his death in 1891 to help elect his brother’s former colonel, Matthew Quay, to the U.S. Senate in 1887, thus fulfilling the promise he made on that sorrowful day in December 1862.

Alfred H. Reed, who succeeded his uncle as editor and publisher and eventually sole owner of the Pittsburgh Commercial Gazette, had no memories of his father but did not forget him.

In the fall of 1914, Alfred H. had his father’s body exhumed from beneath the ornate tombstone that still marks his original gravesite and reburied in the Reed family plot in Allegheny Cemetery in Pittsburgh. In 1917, he presented a large silk flag in memory of his father and grandfather to Butler’s First Presbyterian Church (Covenant) where they had been members. A few years earlier, the son of the slain soldier donated a portrait of his father to the local Civil War veterans’ organization named in the elder Reed’s honor.

Alfred H. Reed died in San Francisco, Calif., on Dec. 26, 1931, at the age of 69 while enjoying a yearlong vacation. He is buried in Pittsburgh’s Historic Allegheny Cemetery next to his father.

Bill May is a local historian, speaker and tour guide.