Elmwood Cemetery

<br>On Wednesday, September 17, 1862, twelve-year-old Mary Bedinger, asleep at her home Poplar Grove outside Shepherdstown, was awakened by the roar of cannons. Confederate and Union forces in position near Sharpsburg, Maryland, just across the Potomac River, were desperately trying to dislodge one another. The bloodiest day in American history had begun. Soon a seemingly endless stream of wounded men flowed into dozens of buildings in and around Shepherdstown that were pressed into service as hospitals. Unfortunately, not all of the wounded men would survive.<br><br>The Southern Soldiers’ Memorial Association of Shepherdstown, West Virginia, was organized in 1867 to acquire a burial site for Confederate soldiers who died during and after the battle. In 1868, the association purchased a lot from Jacob Line adjacent to the Methodist Cemetery. A total of 114 men, many unknown, are interred here from other initial burial sites. The cemetery was dedicated on Confederate Memorial Day, June 5, 1869, and a monument to the dead was dedicated the next year. The Confederate Soldiers regimental monument erected in 1935 by the Sons of Confederate Veterans and the State of West Virginia lists the names of 535 Jefferson County men who served in the Confederate army. In addition to the men buried in the Confederate cemetery, about 125 Confederate veterans are buried in Elmwood Cemetery.<br><br>&#8220;<i>On Thursday [September 18] . . . they continued to arrive until the town [Shepherdstown] was quite unable to hold any more disabled and suffering. They filled every building and overflowed into the country round, into farmhouses, corncribs, and cabins.     . . . There were six churches, and they were all full; the Odd Fellows’ Hall, the Freemasons’, the little Town Council room, the barn-like place known as the Drill Room, all the private houses after their capacity, the shops and empty buildings, the school-houses . . . and yet the cry was for more room.</i>&#8221;<center>- Mary Bedinger Mitchell</center>