By GEORGE ROGERS
of The Gazette
American flags are on the graves of 3,840 veterans in Portage County cemeteries in preparation for Memorial Day.
The flags were purchased by the county, and Tom Pesanka, county veterans service officer, said they were placed on the graves by members of veterans organizations and their auxiliaries.
Even the long-ago War of 1812 is represented here, though there was no Portage County at that time. A few veterans made it here years after the war ended and eight of them are buried here, in the Spiritland, First Belmont, Greenwood, Lower Amherst, Plover, Maine, Morrill and Union cemeteries.
Portage County has no surviving veterans of wars prior to World War II. Pesanka said the county's last World War I vet was Ben Pronz, 97, Stevens Point, who died Feb. 20, 1996, at the Wisconsin Veterans Home at King.
The United States was involved in World War I in 1917-18. Pronz was a native of the town of Sharon who served in the Navy from 1918 to 1921 and was later a sales representative for Reimer's Sausage of Oshkosh before retiring. He is buried here in Guardian Angel Cemetery.
Portage County's last Civil War veteran, Peter Felio, died 65 years ago, on May 6, 1936. He was 88. Felio was a native of Canada who came to the United States as a child and grew up in the Appleton area.
In 1864, at the age of 16, he enlisted in the Union Army. He was wounded, returned to Wisconsin after the war, worked as a logger, a stone mason and a farmer, and had a farm in Portage County's town of Plover for about 30 years. Then he lived in various places in Minnesota, Iowa and Wisconsin, spending the last four years of his life with his son, Louis, in Stevens Point.
On Memorial Day in 1936 Felio was the subject of a community tribute, and at his funeral two songs from the Civil War era, "Shall We Gather at the River" and "Tenting Tonight," were sung. He is buried in the Meehan Cemetery west of Plover.