If you ask someone to name the Medal of Honor recipient from Barnegat, who is buried in Arlington Cemetery, you usually would be met by a distant stare into space and silence. Thus began my search for local hero Henry R. Tilton, who graduated from the University of Pennsylvania with a medical degree in 1859, beginning his career as a surgeon at Philadelphia’s Episcopal Hospital.

With the coming of the Civil War, he enlisted and served with distinction at various posts throughout the war;…