Burying the Dead
The Battle of the Wilderness
At battles end, more than 2,000 Union dead lay scattered through the Wilderness. The first major effort to bury the dead came more than a year later, when a Union regiment received orders to proceed to the Wilderness and inter those Union soldiers whose remains still littered the landscape.
For a week burial parties combed the woods, gathering up 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, as this plot was called, held 534 bodies. Today shallow depressions in the ground are all that remain.
The cemeteries remained in existence only a short time. Concluding that it would be easier to manage one large cemetery rather than several small ones, the War Department transferred the Wilderness dead to Fredericksburg National Cemetery in the late 1860s.
Having collected all that a thorough search could discover, graves were dug….Ten skulls were placed in each coffin, which was then filled with bones - the lid screwed on, and...lowered into their last resting place, unknown, but not unhonored nor unsung.
Lieutenant William D.F. Landon, 1st United States Volunteer Veterans.
Marker is on Orange Plank Road (Virginia Route 621), on the right when traveling east.
Courtesy hmdb.org
