A wreath of roses and sunflowers on a stand beside the Stansbury monument at Baltimore Cemetery, with the national and Maryland colors and a small flag at the headstone.

Society Marks the Grave of COL Elijah Stansbury

Men of the Society gathered at Baltimore Cemetery on Saturday, June 20, 2026, to mark the grave of COL Elijah Stansbury, who stood in the American line at North Point. The colors were brought up, a wreath was set at the stone, and a salute was fired over it.

A wreath of roses and sunflowers on a stand beside the Stansbury monument at Baltimore Cemetery, with the national and Maryland colors and a small flag at the headstone.
The wreath, the colors, and a flag at the Stansbury grave in Baltimore Cemetery.

Stansbury was born in Baltimore County in 1791 and was a bricklayer by trade. He enlisted as a private in Captain John Montgomery’s Baltimore Union Artillery, the company whose four guns stood in the center of the American line on September 12, 1814, when the British came up the road from North Point. He was not the only one of his family there. His father is said to have had seven sons under arms that day.

Two members in War of 1812 uniforms present muskets and fire a salute along a cemetery path, with the Baltimore skyline on the horizon.
A musket salute over the grave, with the city he later governed behind.

The title he is remembered by came afterwards. He was appointed colonel of the 27th Maryland Regiment, a regiment that had itself served at North Point. He went on to the Baltimore City Council in 1824, to the House of Delegates in the 1840s, and he was Mayor of Baltimore from 1848 to 1850, by which time the defense of the city was within living memory, and he was one of the men who carried it.

He died on December 19, 1883, in his ninety-third year, one of the last of the Old Defenders. The city tolled its bells for him.

Five men stand in a line at the grave, two of them in War of 1812 uniform holding muskets and three wearing Society neck ribbons, with the colors behind them.
The men of the Society who marked the grave.

The Society’s own graves database has him, as it has thousands of others: Stansbury, Elijah, private, 1st Artillery, Maryland, 1791 to December 19, 1883, Baltimore Cemetery. A line in a database is where this work starts. A wreath and a salute is where it gets to.

Marking the graves of the men who defended Baltimore is work the Society keeps at. Every one that is found and marked is a man who is no longer only a name on a muster roll, and there are more of them in this city than anybody has yet counted.