BOOK EXCERPT

On November 27, 1923, the last surviving Wisconsin veteran of Company F, Twenty-Ninth Regiment, United States Colored Infantry (USCI), was laid to rest in Walnut Hill Cemetery in Baraboo. Aaron Roberts’s adult life began early when he lied about his age in order to volunteer to fight for the Union and against slavery in the Civil War. After his service, he was a farmer, husband, father and grandfather, carpenter, entrepreneur, minister, and a respected member of every community in which he lived. He was buried in the veterans’ section of the cemetery by his white comrades of the local post of the Grand Army of the Republic and his black brothers of the Madison Masonic Lodge.¹

Aaron Roberts After Nat Turner’s slave rebellion in 1830, free blacks and their allies were no longer welcome along the Virginia/North Carolina border, despite generations of residence there. Over several years, the Robertses and other black and mixed-ancestry families and some white neighbors uprooted themselves and moved to Indiana, joining one of several multiracial farming communities.