BELLEVILLE POST ESSEXNEWSDAILY.COM
DECEMBER 2023
VOL. 36 NO. 03
PBA gets girl Historical society president does his patriotic duty rolling again
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Marching into St. Peter’s
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Belleville HS honors
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Daniel Jackovino Staff Writer Everyday is Veterans’ Day for Michael Perrone, weather permitting. Perrone, the president of the Belleville Historical Society and a mason whose family owns Perrone Mason Contractors in Bloomfield, has for more than 20 years been painstakingly cleaning, throughout northern Jersey, the soiled gravestones and memorials of veterans killed in action. He does this because he feels it is his patriotic duty. Perrone, who does not work alone on these projects, said he recently cleaned the Korean and Vietnam war monument located near the Bloomfield Public Library and the Thomas and Armando Veneziano WWII monument on Newark Avenue. Most of Perrone’s monument work are projects of the Belleville Historical Society and done free-of-charge. However, Perrone Mason Contractors applied a new 23 karat gold leaf to the names on the Glen Ridge 9-11 granite monument outside the police station. He was recently in the Bloomfield Cemetery cleaning the monument of Lt. Henry M. Baldwin, a Civil War casualty, mortally wounded at the Battle of Cedar Creek. The Battle of Cedar Creek was a brutal one day affair occurring Oct. 19, 1864, in Virginia, along the Shenandoah Valley, between the Blue Ridge and Appalachian mountains, near the West Virginia border. Historians say the Union victory gave Lincoln a boost three weeks before the 1864 elections. Future presidents, Col. Rutherford B. Hayes and Capt. William McKinley fought at Cedar Creek. This week, Lt. Baldwin was remembered by Perrone, a local mason with a scrub brush. The Baldwins were one of the first families to settle in Bloomfield. The founding ancestor of most Baldwins was Benjamin Baldwin, a weaver from Milford, Conn. Henry Moore Baldwin was born in See PERRONE, Page 2
Photos Courtesy of Michael Perrone
Michael Perrone, president of the Belleville Historical Society, cleans the monument of Lt. Henry M. Baldwin, a Civil War casualty.