Tuesday, September 18, 2012

Looking for NC's Civil War: Old Lynchburg City Cemetery


Sorry about the slow posting as of late. I've been traveling, speaking to various groups. On one of my trips, I was speaking to the Round Table in Lynchburg, Virginia, and got to revisit the Old Lynchburg City Cemetery. Over the next few days, I'm going to try and tell a few of stories behind some of the pictures of stones that I captured.

Lynchburg became a vast hospital complex during the war. There were 31 different structures (based upon a map at the cemetery) that served as hospitals. An estimated 20,000 men were treated there, with 3,000 deaths (Confederate and a few Federal).

Many of those who died are interred at the Old City Cemetery. Their graves are marked with simple stone grave markers, carved with their initials, company and regiment. A link to those buried here can be found here: http://www.gravegarden.org/cwroster.htm

The photo above is just one of the Confederate monuments in the cemetery. This monument is dedicated to those who died of smallpox during the war.

I have visited this cemetery twice: once when I was working on the book on the 37th NCT, and again in September 2012.

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