During the Civil War, about two hundred members of St. John’s Lutheran Church served in at least eight Confederate army units, including companies in the 8th, 20th, 33rd, 52nd, and 57th North Carolina Infantry regiments and a company in the 1st North Carolina Cavalry. Church members took part in at least 194 skirmishes, battles, and campaigns, including Manassas, Mechanicsville, Fredericksburg, Chancellorsville, Winchester, Petersburg, and Appomattox Court House, Virginia; Gettysburg, Pennsylvania; Charleston, South Carolina; Harpers Ferry, West Virginia; Antietam, Maryland; and numerous battles in eastern North Carolina. Members of the congregation also served in the 2nd Regiment Detailed Men as guards in the prisoner-of-war camp in Salisbury. Approximately one hundred Civil War veterans are buried in the St. John’s cemetery, and the congregation lost about one hundred men to wartime deaths, with most of the dead buried on battlefields or in prisoner-of-war camps. In Cabarrus County, women, children, and the elderly faced the strain of operating farms and meeting daily obligations while so many men were away, and the sacrifices and challenges of the war transformed the congregation for many years. Organized by 1745 as Dutch Buffalo Creek Meeting House, St. John’s Lutheran Church built its present sanctuary in 1845. The older part of the cemetery contains Revolutionary patriots who fought at Moore’s Creek Bridge in North Carolina, Camden in South Carolina, and several other actions, and the graveyard also holds the remains of pioneers, bishops, pastors, former slaves, and Adolph Nussmann, the first full-time Lutheran pastor to North Carolina.