Ball’s Bluff National Cemetery

This national cemetery contains twenty-five graves holding the partial remains of fifty-four Union soldiers killed at the Battle of Ball’s Bluff on October 21, 1861. All are unidentified except Pvt. James Allen of Northbridge, Massachusetts, who served with the 15th Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry. Most Confederate dead were removed to Leesburg, while most fallen Union soldiers found on or near the battlefield were first buried in shallow mass graves between the present cemetery and the Clinton Hatcher marker to the west; some dead from both sides were shipped home for burial. In the fall of 1865, Governor Andrew Curtin sought to have Pennsylvania’s dead returned home, but because individual remains could not be identified four years after the battle, the U.S. Army instead established a cemetery here for the Union dead, completing the work on December 18, 1865. After the battle, a Union burial detail interred forty-seven bodies under a flag of truce on October 22, 1861, and marked about twenty more later buried by Confederates; Union authorities examined the field in spring 1862 and temporarily reinterred remains in mass graves, permanent reinterments began in fall 1865, a first stone wall replaced a picket fence in February 1871, the current stone wall was built in September 1901, the cemetery and battlefield were designated a National Historic Landmark in August 1984, and the Northern Virginia Regional Park Authority assumed ownership of the surrounding battlefield in June 1986.

Leesburg, Virginia · United States