During the late summer of 1861, Confederate troops from Alabama, Mississippi, North Carolina, Tennessee, and Virginia camped near Bristoe Station, where typhoid, measles, and other contagious diseases quickly swept through the camps and decimated many regiments. The colonel of the 6th North Carolina wrote that his regiment averaged about one death per day. Each regiment established its own separate burial ground, and comrades paid military homage by discharging a musketry volley over each grave at the interment, a sound heard daily throughout the brigade's camping grounds. The following spring, Union troops passing through counted nearly 75 graves in the 10th Alabama cemetery and 128 graves in two enclosures for Mississippi soldiers. Except for the 10th Alabama cemetery, which veterans of the unit marked more permanently with stones after the war, the remaining 1861 Confederate burials, along with the graves of Southerners killed in the fighting here in August 1862 and October 1863, are mostly unmarked and cannot be identified.