By the evening of March 22, 1865, both the Union and Confederate armies had left Bentonville, the Union moving toward Goldsboro and the Confederates toward Smithfield, while local residents faced hundreds of wounded Confederate soldiers and more than five hundred Union and Confederate dead buried across their property. Union soldiers were placed in marked graves so their remains could later be moved, while Confederate dead were buried on the battlefield by comrades, Union soldiers, or local residents, including twenty of the twenty-three Confederates who died in the Harper House and were buried by the Harper family beside the family cemetery. In 1867, the U.S. government established National Cemeteries in North Carolina, and Union dead from Bentonville were reinterred in Raleigh National Cemetery, but Confederate dead remained in unmarked or poorly marked graves for nearly thirty years. In 1893, Bentonville native M. Haywood Bizzell asked the North Carolina Monumental Association for an enclosed monument for the Confederate soldiers treated in the Harper House, and after his letter was printed in 1894, the Goldsboro Rifles raised money for an obelisk-style monument, with donations that included Union veteran T. E. Harvey, who had lost four fingers in the battle. On March 20, 1895, Wade Hampton spoke at the dedication, John Harper opened with prayer, and heavy rain cut short a program that had been planned to include a sham battle. Modern ground-penetrating radar indicates a mass grave at the site, though the exact number buried there is unknown.