Scythe Tree
by Marion Bradner in Fate magazine
At twilight on October 30, 1962 I was driving slowly on a road strange to me, Route 5-20. About two miles west of Waterloo, New York, I suddenly spotted a man wearing what appeared to be a faded blue Civil War uniform walking directly ahead of me on the wrong side of the road. Tooting warningly, I braked to a stop. But when I glanced back nobody was in sight.
Nearby I noticed a lighted farmhouse. Deciding he must have fled in that direction I drove there, reasoning that he probably was costumed to participate in some local township’s centenmal celebration.
Having heard my car brakes squealing, the farmer, a man named Lohr, walked to the road’s edge to meet me. When I inquired about the uniformed man he said, “You must've seen James Johnson’s ghost. Folks here says he keeps trying to come home. His Scythe "Tree down the road a piece draws him.”
By daylight I journeyed back to examine the Scythe Tree. There I learned that on October 29, 1861, 26-year-old James Johnson, having joined Company G, 85th New York Volunteers, stuck his scythe into a then-young sapling in the family farmyard, requesting that his parents leave it there until he returned.
On May 22, 1864, at the Confederate Hospital at Raleigh, James died of a thigh wound he’d suffered on April 24, 1864, at Plymouth, near Albemarle Sound. He was buried in an unmarked grave. Until the day of her own death in 1883, his mother awaited his return, refusing to believe he’d been killed. Though the farmhouse passed to another family after Mrs. Johnson’s death, folks still fly an American flag near the Scythe Tree, from sunrise to sunset each day, in James Johnson’s memory.
