FREMONT — Probably no one knew when the last reunion had been, or when the next one would be, or even if this ritual had ever before been held among graves.

But none of that mattered as more than 150 Wagners, Waggoners, and Wagoners from Ohio, Michigan, Indiana, Virginia, Florida and New Jersey streamed into the Fremont cemetery.

Clutched in hands wrinkled and smooth were thin beige pamphlets featuring the date (July 4, 2013) and the family's coat of arms. Bulleted down the backsides were 23 "interesting facts" about John Waggoner, Sr. Among them: He "saved General George Washington's life on several occasions," stood “15 feet from General George Washington when General Cornwallis surrendered,” and was described by Washington as “not afraid of a 1,000 devils."

Jay and Jim Wagoner, the architects of the occasion, stood before the crowd to deliver their opening remarks. Things happened quickly after: John Waggoner's great-great-great-great-great-great grandson Matthew Keefer, along with four in the generation after him, fired the Revolutionary War-era cannon constructed by Jim, after which they unveiled the new tombstone.

After a hundred years, Elizabeth Leach’s name had finally been properly inscribed. Above hers sat her husband’s, and his claim to fame: “A LIFE GUARD OF GEORGE WASHINGTON.”

For all the excitement, the highlight of the occasion might have been the humble blade, embedded in a cane, regally laid on a plastic fold-out table. According to family lore, John Waggoner had escorted George Washington to Mount Vernon at the conclusion of the war, where Washington presented him with a sword-cane for his service. Former Ohio Sen. Mark Wagoner smiled as his then 5-year-old daughter Taylor, a pink ribbon pinching her short brown hair, donned a pair of white gloves and gingerly lifted the sword of her great-great-great-great-great-great grandfather. 

Had any of the Waggoners walked in a straight line five miles east of Four Mile House Cemetery, they would have come upon a distinct yet uncannily similar tombstone, one rounded white and faded with age. This tomb, too, bears the mark of generational renewal, its weathered face hiding an even older twin on its backside.

“JOHN BURKHARD SR.” And under it, startlingly: “A MEMBER OF WASHINGTON’S LIFE GUARD.”

For the inquisitive, a stranger connection waited still: Burkhardt had also passed a sword onto his descendants. This blade, encased in a glass case in an unassuming house in nearby Lindsey, Ohio, forgotten by history, shares nothing in common with John Waggoner's.

Provenance

In the experience of John Burkhardt's great-great-great-great-great-granddaughter Diane Fleming, everyone wants the sword.

Since it passed into her care 34 years ago, she's guarded it against the Rutherford B. Hayes Presidential Library & Museum, the Daughters of the American Revolution, and even demanding in-laws. At some point, the rapids of requests grew so intense she issued an ultimatum: "If you don't stop, I'm going to donate it to the Smithsonian Institute."

But she wasn't, not really. Her great-aunt Marjorie Corinne had almost donated it to the presidential center back in the early 1960s, but ultimately decided to keep it in the family. The Waggoners, ever the skewed mirror of the Burkhardts, took the road not taken. In 1997, Lois E. Gates and her cousins Irene, Clara, and Edna, all residents of Port Clinton, decided that a 200-year-old sword could no longer be kept under beds and stored in attics, never mind given to children to bang against trees. They donated the sword to the presidential center.

That a group of women should decide the final fate of the Waggoner family's most beloved heirloom represented a bit of historical poetry — family tradition had dictated that the sword be passed on to the youngest male of each generation.

The 20-inch blade is now buried in a cloth seal and kept in a climate-controlled room. It has never been historically authenticated.

"There's not a clear provenance that could place this specifically to John Waggoner or George Washington," said Kevin Moore, the museum’s curator of artifacts. 

The maker's mark, typically located on the hilt, is found nowhere, and the mysterious "GZ" emblazoned on both sides of the blade is too large to be one. The heirloom has been visually dated to the late 18th or early 19th century, roughly the right time period, but the nondescript sheath has yielded zero historical data. 

Burkhardt's sword is just as impervious to interpretation. Attached to a generic wooden hilt is two feet of flat metal scarred black by blood and battle. The mended spot where an ancestor snapped the blade in two while cutting corn fodder is still visible.

"That's a presentation sword, it's very decorative," said Ms. Fleming of the Waggoner heirloom. "This is his service sword. It's an ugly piece of metal."

Ugly, but special. It gives her goosebumps, sometimes, the fact that in her home is a sword that that may have extended George Washington's life.

But historians doubt. That any of Washington's bodyguards "saved George Washington’s life on many occasions, and perhaps even on one of them, is unlikely, given the few times that the Continental Army’s highest-ranked general was actually in battle situations," said Andrew Schocket, professor of history at Bowling Green State University.

More so, while the term “bodyguard” may evoke images of the Secret Service, historian Mark Boatner concluded that the Commander-in-Chief’s Guards — alternatively known as “The Life Guards” — were largely a “headquarters security detachment,” standing guard outside of Washington’s residence. 

"My attention has frequently been directed to numerous men alleged to have had service in the Commander-in-Chief's Guard," wrote Carlos E. Godfrey in his seminal 1904 study The Commander-in-Chief's Guard, Revolutionary War. "Almost invariably these allegations could not be verified."

Not that verification is easy. History loves a good mystery, so in 1815 a fire at the Charlestown Navy Guard destroyed the records of the Life Guard. Mr. Godfrey, based on years of meticulous research, reconstructed what he estimated was 75 percent of the roster. Neither John Waggoner nor John Burkhardt appear on the list.

Stories

At the 56th annual reunion of the Wagner-Waggoner-Wagoner family, held at Toledo's Walbridge Park on July 15, 1941, the "historical committee" appointed at the annual reunion a decade earlier distributed the fruits of its research: a 300-page volume, bound in crimson DuPont Fabrikoid leather, exhaustively documenting the genealogy of the family. Each of the 250 copies were printed, engraved and bound for $3.18.

"We endeavor...to give the younger members of the family the chance to know something of the lives the early pioneers lived, the hardships they were called upon to endure, something of their joys and sorrows; all of which had a tendency to build lives of resourcefulness, thrift, and solid worth," wrote Clark R. Wagner in the introduction.

From California to France, the historical committee spared no effort in tracking down and including every person with a Waggoner-seeming surname, even individuals without definitive family ties, such as pioneering journalist Clark Waggoner — the founder of the Sandusky Register and editor-owner of The Blade until 1865.

Just a few years after the Waggoner family, apparently independently, Solomon Burkett II authored a genealogy of his own: "John Burkhardt Sr.: His Family and War Record." Though much shorter than the Waggoner family’s, it touches upon the same themes: the variants of the family name, the dozens of descendants that have reshaped northwest Ohio, the struggles of settling the Great Black Swamp, and of course, the unimpeachable character of the men who started it all. 

Here the two genealogies border on mutual plagiarism. John George Burkhardt was born in Switzerland in 1753; John Waggoner was born in France in 1758. Both men settled in southern Pennsylvania, in an area known for its German immigrants; both men enlisted in the Revolutionary Army at Reading, Pa.

Following the dispensation of government land grants, John Waggoner moved to Perry County, Ohio in 1803, and then Sandusky County in 1827; John Burckhardt repeated the steps in 1810 and 1835, respectively. Waggoner had 10 children with his first wife, Elizabeth Leach, before marrying her sister Sarah after her passing. Burkhardt had 8 children with his first wife, Mary Barbara Fox, before marrying her sister Catherine after her passing. Both men died in Sandusky County — John Waggoner in 1842, John Burkhardt in 1847. 

Neither genealogy make much mention of the other family. What each does do is paint a picture of unmatched intergenerational communal and military service. 

“A week probably doesn't go by where I don't get a smile on my face and have an incredible sense of pride,” said Jay Wagoner. As a history buff, he understands that some family lore, like Washington’s “1,000 devils” quote, is of dubious veracity. But between the pension papers and early Ohio histories, “it's nice that there's so much evidence that shows we're not making these stories up.”

In the fifth series of the Pennsylvania Archives’ third volume, both John Waggoner’s and John Burckhardt’s names appear on the roster of Capt. Bartholomew Von Heer’s Maréchaussée Corps, also known as the “Light Dragoons.” This "cavalry troop," wrote Solomon Burkett II in his family genealogy, was organized "for the purpose of acting as a body guard to General George Washington."

In reality, the Continental Congress created the corps "to watch over the Regularity and good Order of the Army in Camp, Quarters, or on the March, quell Riots, prevent marauding, straggling and Desertions, detect Spies, regulate sutlers and the like.” They were, in other words, the Continental Army's mounted police unit — not Washington's bodyguards.

Testimony

But Solomon Burkett II has hardly been alone in conflating the Life Guards and the Maréchaussée Corps. Multiple accounts of German-American history published during the 20th century refer to Von Heer’s men as Washington’s “mounted body-guard,” with some claiming it replaced the original Life Guards. What is the origin of this claim? Several sources cite an article published in the Altoona Tribune on Dec. 31, 1937. A Blade review of the issue found no such article exists.

What does exist, buried in the archives of the Cincinnati Historical Society, is an obscure letter written on May 14, 1849. The letter, eventually published in the Chicago Tribune on Oct. 23, 1875, was authored by Col. John Johnston, the first president of the Historical and Philosophical Society of Ohio (now the Cincinnati Historical Society) and a close friend of light dragoon Lewis Boyer. In it, he testified that Von Heer’s men were "placed around the person of the Commander-in-Chief, and subject to no duty but at headquarters to carry orders, go and return with the mail, and escort the General and his staff.”

Military records might support this testimony. In his 2006 book George Washington's Enforcers: Policing the Continental Army, former University of Richmond professor Harry M. Ward noted that rotated cavalry troops were often attached to the Life Guard. A scarcity of horsemen resulted in Von Heer’s troops fulfilling a much broader scope of duties than initially intended, including occasional “guard duty similar to that expected of the Life Guard.” This challenge to the Life Guard’s prestige bred resentment charged by anti-German racism and exacerbated by the mounted police’s authority to arrest “even members of the Life Guard."

At the war's end, Washington required 12 horsemen to accompany him on the first leg of his trip home to Mount Vernon. Upon their discharge in December 1783, he gifted them with a "horse, arms, and accoutrements." Since surviving records suggest that at least two of these men were from Von Heer’s troops, John Waggoner might very well have been among them — which might explain why he received a decorative sword when Burkhardt apparently did not

The democratization of the Life Guard and flexibility of the Maréchaussée Corps may also explain why Von Heer’s dragoons, from John Burkhardt in Ohio to Michael Sechler in Pennsylvania, called themselves Life Guards after the war. John Waggoner himself, in his 1828 pension application, described himself as both a private dragoon under Von Heer and a Washington Life Guard, suggesting that in his mind they were one and the same.

Forensic

Richard VanNess knows it’s hard to believe, but in his seven years as a tour guide at the Rutherford B. Hayes Presidential Library and Museums, he has never once seen the sword.

At least once a month, his co-worker Mr. Moore retrieves it from storage to share it with yet another wowed Waggoner from a far-flung corner of the country. Now, Mr. VanNess knows a thing or two about swords — he grew up in Lindsey by his cousin Diane Fleming, with whom his sister went to school, and he loves history so much that after 26 years with the Fremont Fire Department he went to the University of Toledo for a degree.

Fitting, then, that history, in the form of a fellow tour guide, recently introduced him to another of its lovers: Jay Wagoner. The two spiritual cousins forged the foundations of a friendship. Seven generations after their deaths, John Waggoner and John Burkhardt are still moving in lockstep.

Jay Wagoner hasn’t yet shown his 5-year-old daughter the sword, nor the family genealogy sitting in a sealed plastic bag in his safe. They can wait until she’s old enough to appreciate them.

Reading the book as an adult — she tracked down a copy on Amazon.com for $30 — has inspired Stacie Wagoner, of Toledo, to revive a dying family tradition: reunions. They had been annual occurrences, once, nestled in her mind as half-remembered dreams: Sunshine above and a sparkling body of water beyond, gaggles of conversating cousins and aunts and uncles —“It was a blast.”

For years, Stacie used Facebook to repeat the historical committee’s mission of connecting the entire Waggoner empire. She was going to organize the first major family reunion since 2013, the one she missed. But then Mark Wagoner’s father became Lucas County’s first coronavirus casualty, and she “couldn't in good conscience” risk it. So she’ll wait, and in the meantime she might finally visit Four Mile House Cemetery, where she’ll sit, book cradled in her arms, before John Waggoner, Sr.’s grave.

Ms. Fleming, too, often revisits her family’s book. It was last revised in 1969, by the same pair that renewed Burkhardt’s tombstone: her great-aunt and uncle, Marjorie Corinne and Solomon Russell. Of the future custodian of the family's most treasured heirloom, they wrote: "Diane is still in school and is active in the Girl Scouts projects." 

Yes, it’s due for an update — and like her great-aunt, Ms. Fleming intends to do it without consulting Ancestry.com. She’ll use the sources the family always has: “What I’ve been told, what’s been documented,” and what she now personally knows. 

She does wonder about her sword. Historian Harry Ward concluded that neither the Life Guards nor the Maréchaussée Corps likely saw much, if any, combat. Family lore suggests otherwise. Modern forensic analysis, Ms. Fleming knows, could sate her morbid curiosity: Just how many people has the sword slayed? Yet she’s not sure how she’d feel if traces of blood were indeed found.

So it’s alright. She doesn’t need to know. 

First Published November 7, 2021, 1:00 p.m.