Confederate Cemetery
A National Cemetery Story
by Thomas Zei
(c) 2024 by Thomas Zei. Used by permission by Friends of Stones River National Battlefield and all rights reserved by the author.
When discussing the national cemetery with visitors, the most asked question is "So where are the Confederates buried?" The quickest answer is to respond with The Confederate Circle at Evergreen Cemetery in Murfreesboro. The full answer is more complicated then saying where they are buried now. By doing so, one leaves out the first attempt to provide a suitable recognition of their sacrifice.
The Confederate and Union dead from the Battle of Stones River (Murfreesboro) were buried in shallow graves wherever they fell on the battlefield. This would also apply to those that died in field hospitals or the hospitals in Murfreesboro from wounds or disease. In 1865, the Union Army decided to create Stones River National Cemetery and they searched the battlefield to remove and rebury the Union soldiers into the new consolidated location.
Photo from family tree of Jesse Cantrell Sykes
An article in The Murfreesboro Monitor on December 7, 1867 provided an overview of the project and a status report. The article stated that:
“Captain Arnold has already exhumed a great many, the majority unknown, with no possible way of ascertaining their names or commands. A single silver case watch, No. 56050 was found upon one body, a brass locket containing two photographs, which are disfigured, upon another and single silver watch, No. 15628 upon a third. These articles may lead to their identity.”
Although Captain Arnold’s Confederate Cemetery had a capacity of 6000 burials, his efforts and resources stopped at 1800-2000 burials. Each grave was marked with a small wooden plank. Without the benefit of Confederate burial maps, unlike those available for the Union reburial efforts, most were marked as an unknown soldier. Less than two hundred had full names while some only had initials.
By June 1874, The Murfreesboro Monitor noted that the cemetery’s fencing had already fallen down in places and animals were grazing on the unkempt property. The cemetery property was also located in the flood plain of Lytle Creek causing periodic damage to the wooden planks.
Captain Arnold passed away suddenly in 1884. The condition of his prized Confederate Cemetery continued to worsen without funding and its advocate. The Ladies Memorial Association began to lobby for the movement of the Confederate dead out of the cemetery. In 1889, a letter is posted in the Murfreesboro Free Press comparing the “National Federal Cemetery as a thing of beauty, for the government pays well for its keeping.” The writer states that the Federal cemetery is visited by the thousands. Meanwhile the Confederate Cemetery is almost in utter ruin and an elderly widow who travels many miles only finds thousands of graves marked as “unknown”.
Under this constant pressure, a decision is made to create a suitable memorial to the Confederate dead at Evergreen Cemetery, the town’s main cemetery. In 1891, the Joseph Palmer Bivouac #10 of the Association Confederate Soldiers Tennessee Division began the task of moving the Confederate dead to a newly designated spot in Evergreen Cemetery. Because of the large number of unknown soldiers and the condition of the graves, the decision was made to bury all of the unknowns into a single circular mass grave. Only about ten bodies are buried in marked individual graves.
The spot of land becomes known as The Confederate Circle. The mass grave is encircled with the names of the states providing their sons in the battle. A marble shaft is added in 1915 as a monument. In 1982, memorial markers are placed engraved with the names of the 156 soldiers named in the 1882 newspaper article.
