Southern Historical Society Papers, Volume 7.
Reverend J. William Jones, Ed.

---

“ [350] save the country,” which terminated in the brilliant victory of first Manassas. Looking southward, we see the field of Kernstown, where Stonewall Jackson first taught Shields the caution which he afterwards used with such discretion. There are the hills from which we drove Banks on the morning of May 25th, 1862, and in full view the streets of the town, through which we rushed pell-mell after the enemy, amid the waving of handkerchiefs by the noble women and the cheers of the whole people. Yonder is Milroy's Fort, which, in June, 1863, General Early says, was “surprised and captured by Colonel Hilary P. Jones' battalion of artillery.” And the very location of the cemetery is on a part of the field where, on the 19th of September, 1862, Early's little army had won a splendid victory over Sheridan's overwhelming numbers, when it was wrested from its grasp by a flank and rear movement of the enemy's cavalry, which alone considerably outnumbered Early's whole army. Indeed, as one looks out on this beautiful landscape, every hill, and valley, and stream, and hamlet, seems redolent with memories of those stirring movements by which Winchester changed hands no less than eighty-three times during the war, and we can almost see Johnston, Jackson, Stuart, Ewell, Ashby, A. P. Hill, Early, Breckinridge, Gordon, Rodes, Ramseur, Pegram, and other chieftians leading their brave men to the onset.

How appropriate that, amid such scenes as these, a monument should be reared to the “unknown and unrecorded dead” of the rank and file who followed these splendid leaders.

But above all, there stands hard by the heroic old town of Winchester, whose people, from 1861 to 1865, threw open their doors to the Confederate soldier, and esteemed it a sweet privilege to share with him their last crust of bread, and whose noble women were “ministering angels” in the hospital, and always ready to make any sacrifice, endure any hardship, suffer any privation or risk any danger for the land they loved so well and the cause they served so faithfully.

We would have expected these people to have honored the Confederate dead and accordingly we find that as early as the autumn of 1865 (before any similar movement, North or South, had been inaugurated), two ladies of Winchester (Mrs. Phil. Williams and Mrs. A. H. H Boyd) conceived the plan of gathering into one cemetery and properly caring for the remains of the Confederate soldiers scattered through the Valley. They called around them their sisters, and went to work so vigorously that in October, 1866, they dedicated “Stonewall Cemetery,” and announced that they had collected and buried in it the bodies of 2,494 Confederate soldiers.

They have continued to improve the cemetery, until it is now one of the most beautiful in the land. Each State has its own section, and the dead from Virginia, Maryland, North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Florida, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Texas, Arkansas and Kentucky are all arranged in well kept graves, each one of which is marked with a neat headboard; and in the center of each section is a wooden shaft, appropriately inscribed to the fallen heroes of that particular State. Each section is under the charge of a committee of ladies, who vie with each other in honorable rivalry for the proper care of “our graves.”