Confederate Captain William Davison is buried here after dying on March 7, 1865, from a gunshot wound suffered in a firefight with Union Home Guard near Patesville on February 24, 1865, during the Civil War. In 1864, Davison led a band of rebel guerrillas that raided counties from Brandenburg to Owensboro, and the rebels burned the Daviess County Courthouse on January 4, 1865. Hawesville Cemetery is also the burial place for thirty-eight passengers of the steamboat Reindeer, who were killed when a boiler exploded on the Ohio River between Cannelton, Indiana, and Hawesville on March 13, 1854, and a gravestone on the northeast edge marks the location where the victims were buried in a mass grave.