Orange County volunteers place 4,000 flags at veterans cemetery

Orange County students and cadets spent the days before Memorial Day planting more than 4,000 American flags at the Veterans Memorial Cemetery in Goshen, turning a holiday tribute into a countywide act of labor and remembrance.

Junior ROTC members from S.S. Seward Institute in Florida joined the effort at the 19-acre cemetery at 111 Craigville Road, where county officials said the flags were meant to honor service members who died in military service. The flags were scheduled to remain in place through the holiday weekend, creating a corridor of red, white and blue for families who came to pay their respects.

The cemetery has become Orange County’s busiest veterans cemetery, a fact that gives the annual flag placement added weight. Many local families have relatives buried there, and others have returned for years to mark Memorial Day at a site that now holds roughly 4,038 memorial records. In that setting, the work done by students and cadets did more than decorate graves. It put younger residents in direct contact with the county’s military history and made remembrance visible row by row.

The cemetery itself grew out of the vision of the late Thomas C. Agnew, who directed the Orange County Veterans Service Agency from 1993 to 1999. County materials say Agnew, who served in the U.S. Army from November 1967 to December 1974 and received the Distinguished Flying Cross for his Vietnam service, helped shape the cemetery that later opened on June 3, 2000.

The flag placement has become a recurring Memorial Day tradition in Orange County. In a previous county observance, Steven M. Neuhaus, Sheriff Paul Arteta and Veterans Service Agency Director Christian Farrell joined Minisink Valley High School JROTC and the Nam Knights to place flags on more than 3,000 graves. A later Veterans Day observance again brought nearly 4,000 flags to the cemetery, underscoring how the site has become the county’s central place for public remembrance.

This year’s effort carried the same message in larger form. With S.S. Seward Institute Junior ROTC helping shoulder the work, Orange County’s Memorial Day observance once again linked schools, veterans groups and county government in a shared task that honored the dead not just with ceremony, but with the physical act of marking each grave.