Cross Creek Cemetery
Confederate Burial Grounds
This is the oldest public cemetery in Fayetteville, begun in 1785. Mrs. Anne K. Kyle, who served as a nurse in the hospital here during the Civil War, established the Confederate Burial Ground soon after Union Gen. William T. Sherman and his army left Fayetteville in March 1865. She and Fayetteville Mayor Archibald McLean selected a spot in the back section of the cemetery overlooking Cross Creek to inter the soldiers. The Rev. Joseph C. Huske of St. John's Episcopal Church officiated at a mass burial here later in the spring.
After the war, Mrs. Kyle and a group of Fayetteville women worked together to erect a monument to the memory of the Confederate dead. Raffling a home-made silk quilt raised funds, as many tickets were sold for a dollar each. The monument was erected in 1868 and is the oldest Confederate monument in North Carolina.
The monument is the work of George Lauder, the most productive stonecutter in North Carolina during the nineteenth century. Lauder, a native of Scotland, also worked on the State Capitol in Raleigh and at the Fayetteville Arsenal, before opening his own marble yard in Fayetteville in 1845. Late in the 1860s, John R. Tolar dedicated another memorial in this section to his father and eight uncles who were killed or disabled during the war. In addition to the Confederate dead, many other Civil War veterans, Southern and Northern, are interred in this part of the cemetery.
Marker is on Cool Spring Street, on the left when traveling south.
Courtesy hmdb.org
