Devoid of trees in 1862, this hill gave Gen. Thomas J. "Stonewall" Jackson's troops their first good look at Front Royal and the Union garrison's deployments there. Approaching from the south on the Gooney Manor Road, now Browntown Road, Col. Stapleton Crutchfield, Jackson's artillery chief, posted a battery here, but the smoothbore cannon lacked the range to reach the Union guns on Richardson's Hill, a mile and three quarters farther north. Lt. Samuel J. Simpson, a native of the area, then led Crutchfield's artillery on a path concealed by woods around the western end of town and up the ridge where Randolph Macon Academy stands, and by 3:30 p.m. a Confederate rifled cannon was in position there. Meanwhile, the 1st Maryland Infantry, CSA, and the Louisiana Brigade advanced on Front Royal from the southeast, and the Marylanders overran pickets who revealed that they belonged to the 1st Maryland Infantry, U.S., which garrisoned the town. Front Royal's Federal defenders were commanded by Col. John R. Kenly and consisted of a thousand infantrymen and a two-gun section of rifled artillery on Richardson's Hill, a meager force with which he tried to protect the military supplies stored in town, the Manassas Gap Railroad, and the bridges over the forks of the Shenandoah River. When the surviving pickets straggled in, Kenly understood that his force was about to be tested. On November 7, 1868, the Ladies' Warren Memorial Association was chartered to gather Confederate dead buried at sites across Warren County and rebury them in this circular lot, later called Soldier's Circle. Although locating and moving the bodies required much labor and expense and was especially difficult in the postwar era, the remains of 276 soldiers representing every state in the former Confederacy were soon interred here. About 90 were identified and placed in separate graves with marble headstones, while the remains of 186 unknown soldiers were buried in a common grave at the center of the circle, and on Aug. 24, 1882, an 18-foot-high monument was erected above them. A memorial service is held annually on the anniversary of the Battle of Front Royal. Several notable local residents are buried elsewhere in Prospect Hill Cemetery, including Lt. Samuel J. Simpson and the diarist Lucy Buck.