Warrenton Cemetery
Notable Confederate Resting Place
The gate to your right opens to Warrenton
Cemetery, the final resting place of 986 Confederate soldiers, of every Southern state, about
650 casualties of the Civil War. Many wounded
Confederates were evacuated to Warrenton and
vicinity after the First and Second Battles of Manassas, and 585 died and are buried here. Their identities were lost when Union soldiers burned the wooden grave markers for firewood in the winter of 1863. Their remains were reburied
here in 1877. The
memorial wall was
constructed in 1998,
listing 520 names recovered in 1996 from medical records in the National Archives.
The most famous Confederate officer buried here, Col. John Singleton Mosby—the Gray Ghost—gained fame during the war as a scout, spy, and partisan ranger leader. After the war,
he practiced law locally, and President Ulysses S. Grant appointed him U.S. Consul to Hong Kong.
Capt. John Quincy Marr, the first Confederate officer killed in the war, who died in an
engagement at Fairfax Court House on June 1, 1861, is buried here. Two of Fauquier County’s four Confederate generals are also interred here: William Fitzhugh Payne, commander of Fauquier County’s famed Black Horse Troop, and Lunsford Lindsay Lomax, a cavalry commander at Gettysburg who later served as commissioner of Gettysburg National Military Park.
Other notables include Samuel Chilton, defense counsel at abolitionist John Brown’s 1859 treason trial; John Tyler Waller, President John Tyler’s grandson, killed in March 1865 fighting the 8th Illinois Cavalry; and Pendleton Ball, enslaved teamster and physician’s servant, who applied for a Confederate pension.
Marker is at the intersection of West Lee Street and South Chestnut Street, on the left when traveling west on West Lee Street.
Courtesy hmdb.org
