Military History | Washington Confederate Cemetery — Two Stones in the Grass

On 5 September 1992 a marble slab was set flush with the turf on a hillside in Hagerstown. Maryland's architectural survey of the cemetery transcribes it: TWO UNKNOWN SOLDIERS / BATTLE OF SHARPSBURG MD / KILLED SEPTEMBER 17, 1862 / REBURIED SEPTEMBER 5, 1992. The same file records that the remains beneath it had been found on the D. R. Miller farm, inside the Antietam battlefield.

The plot exists because the trustees of Antietam National Cemetery declined to admit Confederate reburials there. In 1870 the Maryland General Assembly repealed its earlier appropriation for that purpose, chartered a cemetery of its own, and required it to stand within a mile of Hagerstown. Trustees under Henry Kyd Douglas bought two and three-quarter acres inside Rose Hill Cemetery in 1872 for $2,400. Henry C. Mumma of Sharpsburg then contracted to lift the Confederate dead from their field graves, hiring local labour; 1,721 had been moved by the end of 1872 and 2,447 by August 1874. Scharf's history of western Maryland puts the price at an average of one dollar and a half per head, and the Hagerstown Mail of 26 June 1874 gave $1.65 each for 255 recovered near South Mountain.

What the removals produced was a count. A plaque placed during the Civil War Centennial reproduces Joseph Coxson's 1888 plan of the ground and gives 346 known against 2,122 unknown. The identified lie by state, the rest in rows, all of it curved around a marble figure of Hope facing west from a granite pedestal.

When the survey was made in 1993, two stones lay in the grass. The older reads COL. S. E. LUMKINS, 44TH GEORGIE VOLS. It marks Samuel P. Lumpkin of the 44th Georgia, moved here in 1913, his name and his state misspelled.

Maryland owns the plot still, and flies its flag beside the statue.

📸 Cover: the statue of Hope and the Maryland flag above the Confederate plot, Rose Hill Cemetery, Hagerstown (Tcochr01, 2010, public domain).