Burying the Dead

At battle's end, more than 2,000 Union dead lay scattered through the Wilderness. More than a year later, a Union regiment received orders to proceed to the Wilderness and bury those Union soldiers whose remains still littered the landscape. For a week, burial parties combed the woods, gathering as many remains as they could find. They placed the bones in wooden coffins and buried them in two temporary graveyards, one near here beside the Orange Plank Road and the other on the Orange Turnpike. Wilderness National Cemetery #2 held 534 bodies, and today shallow depressions in the ground are all that remain. The cemeteries existed only a short time, because the War Department decided it would be easier to manage one large cemetery rather than several small ones and transferred the Wilderness dead to Fredericksburg National Cemetery in the late 1860s. As Lieutenant William D.F. Landon of the 1st United States Volunteer Veterans recalled, graves were dug, ten skulls were placed in each coffin, the coffins were filled with bones, and then lowered into their last resting place, unknown, but not unhonored nor unsung.

Virginia · United States