Welcome to the Confederate Cemetery

Welcome to the Confederate Cemetery. . In September 1862 following the Civil War Battles at South Mountain and Sharpsburg, wounded soldiers began pouring into Shepherdstown. Mary Bedinger Mitchell, 12 years old at the time, was living just outside of town at Poplar Grove, and remembered that, "The wounded continued to arrive until the town was quite unable to hold any more disabled and suffering. They filled every building and overflowed into the country round, every inch of space, and yet the cry was for more room." Eventually, many of the wounded moved on. For a few, Shepherdstown was their final resting place., In 1867, the Southern Soldiers Memorial Association of Shepherdstown was founded "for the purpose of collecting into a burial ground the bodies of Confederate Soldiers killed during the Civil War and caring for their graves and perpetuating the memory of their heroic deeds." In 1868, the group, led by Joseph McMurran, James Madison Hendricks, William L. Arthur, John Will Taylor and John William Benjamin Frazier, purchased "a piece of land" from Jacob Line adjacent to the Methodist Cemetery to serve as the final resting place for men who were either killed or died from wounds received during the Maryland Campaign. Initially their interments were marked with wooden headstones. The Confederate Cemetery was formally dedicated on Saturday, June 5, 1869 and transferred to the care of Elmwood by 1871. In 1884, the Southern Soldiers Memorial Association had the wooden markers replaced with marble headstones., Today among the 171 standing headstones, there are 112 known burials for the state of Georgia (22), Virginia (20), North Carolina (19), South Carolina (12), Louisiana (6), Mississippi (6), Alabama (4), Florida (3), and Texas (3). Fifteen men are named but no state is given. The names of 59 of the men buried here are Unknown., Wayside courtesy Jefferson County Historical Society, 2018