Weymouth has five Medal of Honor recipients, and each one has a school named after him; Quincy recognized its congressional honoree with a park. And for years, Harriet Kirkpatrick has expected Hingham to do something similar for her grandfather, Herbert Louis Foss, a resident and town employee who received the highest US military decoration for his bravery in the Spanish-American War more than 100 years ago.
But plans to name schools, Town Hall, and part of Hingham Harbor after Foss all have fallen through. And while the state is moving ahead with naming a new commuter boat terminal in Hingham Harbor after her grandfather, who was a Navy seaman, Kirkpatrick says she’s had it with the town.
She’s so annoyed that she’s asked selectmen to return a display case featuring Foss’s medal, his photo, and other memorabilia that have been display in Town Hall’s lobby for more than two decades.
“I don’t feel they deserve it,” said Kirkpatrick, who lives in Weymouth. “They shot down everything that anyone wanted.”
Hingham officials are asking for just a little more patience.
“It’s been frustrating, but we’re almost there,” said Selectman Paul Healey, the board’s chairman, who said he finds the medal “very inspiring. It’s American greatness manifested.”
“I think it’s a little unfair to say the town hasn’t done anything,” said Jonathan Asher, who chairs the town’s Veterans’ Council. “Should things have been done more quickly? Certainly. But it’s tough in a town as old as Hingham to find ways to memorialize someone.”
Many communities run into problems when they try to honor their Medal of Honor recipients, according to Ronald T. Rand, a Quincy native who heads the Congressional Medal of Honor Foundation in Arlington, Va.
“There are only 3,493 recipients” since 1861, “and not all of them have been properly recognized,” Rand said. “I think some communities come together around these ideas, get the funding, and get the public support quickly, and others take more time — some 10 to 15 years.”
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That said, at least one recipient — Elden Johnson — is recognized in two communities for his World War II heroism: Scituate, where Johnson grew up and is buried, named a street corner for him and installed a flagpole and plaque there; and Weymouth, where Johnson joined the Army and later lived, named a school after him.
A former veterans’ services director in Hingham, Michael Cunningham, said he’s still shocked that it’s taken so long to get recognition for Foss in his hometown.
Foss is one of 263 Massachusetts veterans awarded the medal, which is given by Congress for “conspicuous gallantry and intrepidity in action at the risk of life above and beyond the call of duty.” For Foss, that meant keeping his cool while his ship was under intense enemy fire off the coast of Cuba in 1898, and helping to slice a section of cable, severing communication between Cuba and Spain.
Foss, who was born in Maine, moved to Hingham with his wife in the early 1900s, working first at the Naval Ammunition Depot and then at the town’s Fort Hill Cemetery. He died in 1937 while mowing grass around veterans’ graves at the cemetery, and he was buried there in a military and Masonic ceremony.
Cunningham said he was “mortified when I came to town that there wasn’t a blade of grass named after that man. He died in 1937 and it wasn’t until 1987 that they marked his grave.”
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Cunningham, now director of veterans’ services for Milton and Randolph, said he organized an annual celebration at Foss’s grave on his birthday, Oct. 12, and tried to get him more public recognition.
The first plan — naming a new elementary school after Foss — foundered in 2009 when it ran into opposition from those wanting to name the building after the school district’s superintendent, Dorothy Galo. Similar opposition stopped a proposal to name Hingham Middle School after Foss.
Veterans groups next tried to get Hingham’s Town Hall changed to the Herbert L. Foss Municipal Center, an idea that died when resistance grew to naming the building after anyone.
A proposal to dedicate all of Hingham’s Inner Harbor to Foss, and to build a monument there, became mired in controversy when some suggested that another Medal of Honor recipient — Civil War General Wilmon Blackmar — should be honored, too, because he married into a prominent Hingham family and summered there for 25 years.
In the midst of the squabbling, the Legislature voted in August 2014 to name the new commuter boat terminal being built at the Hingham Shipyard after Foss.
Since then, the town has commissioned sculptor Susan Luery to make a bronze bust of Foss, which will be placed atop a granite base inside the building, Asher said. He said the town has the $24,000 to pay for the work, which should be finished in February.
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“I’ve been working on this for six years, and I am going to accomplish this mission,” Asher said. “This is going to happen. There will be a memorial to Herbert Lewis Foss.”
Healey said he hopes Kirkpatrick and her family would reconsider their request to retrieve the medal display they originally brought to Town Hall.
“We’re trying to avoid public embarrassment,” Healey said. “We have the sculpture committed, we’ll have a plaque, the building will be named after him. We’ll have a ceremony, and it will be very dignified. We hope the family will be there. It’s been frustrating, but we’re almost there.”
But Kirkpatrick is still irked at Hingham; she said the last straw was the selectmen’s decision in June not to reappoint Jim Claypoole to the Veterans’ Council after he had worked so hard for veterans and on getting her grandfather recognition.
“I don’t want to charge the front doors and take stuff away,” she said. “I don’t want to do it that way. But if I have to, I will.”
Johanna Seltz can be reached at seltzjohanna@gmail.com.