Washington Confederate Cemetery

Immediately after the Civil War, Union casualties from the Frederick and Washington County areas were re-interred at a new National Cemetery at Sharpsburg, but no provision was made for thousands of hastily buried Confederates. To address this, the State of Maryland chartered the Washington Confederate Cemetery in 1870 and authorized funds to gather and bury Confederate dead in one place. In 1872, the cemetery's Board of Trustees, led by Hagerstonian and former Confederate officer Colonel Henry Kyd Douglas, purchased 2.75 acres from Rose Hill Cemetery and spent the next three years collecting the soldiers' remains. The cemetery holds approximately 346 identified and 2,122 unknown Confederate servicemen who died in the Antietam, Gettysburg, and Monocacy campaigns, and it was formally dedicated on June 15, 1877, with former Confederate General Fitzhugh Lee as keynote speaker. In September 1961, former President Dwight D. Eisenhower and General Ulysses S. Grant III rededicated it during a large ceremony marking the Civil War centennial anniversary. Among those re-interred there was Colonel Isaac E. Avery of the 6th North Carolina State Troops, who was mortally wounded while leading Hoke's Brigade in an assault on Cemetery Hill at Gettysburg on July 2, 1863; after writing a final note in his own blood to his second-in-command, he died, and after wartime delays prevented his servant Elijah from taking his remains back to North Carolina, he was buried at Williamsport and later moved here. Also buried there is Colonel Samuel P. Lumpkin of the 44th Georgia Infantry, who was wounded by artillery fire on the first day of Gettysburg, had a leg amputated, was left in Hagerstown during the Confederate retreat toward Virginia, died there of typhoid in September after falling into Union hands, and was moved here in 1913 from the Presbyterian Church Cemetery.

Hagerstown, Maryland · United States