Cape Fear Historian: Some of the Men on the Monument -- Oakdale

Eleven on the fallen are buried at Oakdale Cemetery, in Wilmington.

Thomas F. Bagley, Jr.'s gravestone, Oakdale Cemetery

Thomas F. Bagley, Jr. died on February 23, 1918 in New Hanover County. He was a soldier in the U.S. army and died of accidental asphyxiation by gas. His tombstone states he was a corporal in the 8th Company, Cape Fear Coastal Artillery, at Fort Caswell.

Fort Caswell, about 1918
CFM 1980.045.0064
Gift of Henry Jay MacMillan

Jasper Best's grave, Oakdale Cemetery

Jasper Leon Best was born in 1888, and died in SC in December 21, 1917. He died at Camp Sevier. Best was a private in the 119th infantry's company B. Before the war, Best worked for the Atlantic Coastline Railroad as a car repairman. The paper announced that he died of “pneumonia following measles.”

Arthur Bluethenthal was the first Wilmingtonian to die in combat in World War I.

Arthur was born in Wilmington in 1891. He attended the prestigious Philips Exeter Academy between 1907 and 1909. In 1913, Arthur graduated from Princeton University, where he had been a football star. After graduating, Bluethenthal went to work for his father’s business, and coached football at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and at his alma mater, Princeton.

In 1916, after World War had raged in Europe for two years, Arthur joined the American Field Service in France where he became a member of the ambulance service.

Arthur (far left) playing cards in the Ambulance Corps, 1916
CFM 1990.066.0015

He later joined the French Foreign Legion and became an aviator. His plane was shot down near Maignelay, about fifty miles north of Paris, on June 5, 1918. Arthur was a decorated war hero before his death, and the French government posthumously awarded him the Croix de Guerre with Palm on June 9, 1918.

Bluethenthal was first buried in Europe.