After the fighting at South Mountain ended, the army that held the battlefield determined how the dead were treated. A few men from each Union regiment were assigned to burial details, and to prevent disease they lined up the bodies where they fell and quickly buried them in shallow trenches. They processed their own dead first, often identifying soldiers by notes pinned to their uniforms. Confederate soldiers who died there were less fortunate, as most lost their identity at burial and were marked only by crude wooden headboards with inscriptions such as “100 dead Rebs buried here.” Some Union families later retrieved loved ones for reburial, but most Union dead remained on the battlefield until 1867, when the War Department reinterred them in Antietam National Cemetery. Because the National Cemetery trustees refused to accept the Confederate dead, Maryland provided permanent burial at Rose Hill Cemetery in Hagerstown, where the South Mountain Confederate dead were laid to rest in 1874.
