Burying the Dead-The Battle of the Wilderness - Lake Wilderness VA
Posted by: 
Don.Morfe
N 38° 17.876 W 077° 42.877
18S E 262610 N 4242358
At battle's 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.
Waymark Code: WM134D8
Location: Virginia, United States
Date Posted: 09/13/2020
Views: 0
Burying the Dead-The Battle of the Wilderness— Fredericksburg and Spotsylvania National Military Park —At battle's 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.
LOCATION: Marker is near Lake Wilderness, Virginia, in Spotsylvania County. Marker is on Orange Plank Road (Virginia Route 621), on the right when traveling east. Marker is in the Wilderness Battlefield section of Fredericksburg and Spotsylvania National Battlefield, on Orange Plank Road (Route 621), about 1/2 mile west of Brock Road (Route 613). Located at stop seven of the driving tour of the Wilderness Battlefield. Postal address: 10925 Orange Plank Rd, Spotsylvania VA 22551,
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