"Lovely as the Southerners may have thought Richmond, there was a most immediate and pressing problem confronting he victorious Confederates and the civilian population alike - the ghastly task of buring the dead. In many cases this had to be done by the civilian poputlation, since the military action moved so fast that in few cases was a dead soldier on either side buried by the comrades of his own company. They were too busily engaged in making more corpses, and in the last stages of the action, the Federals were fleeing and the Condederates pursuing too radidly. The heat remained in the 90s, and to get the bodies out of the brush along the rail fences and little stands of shell-scarred woodlands and cornfields and into shallow graves was a task long remembered by the local farmers and their sons and/or slaves who had to accomplish it. At the Robert Cornelison farm near the cemetery, during the three weeks it served as a hospital, it soon became necessary to rebury arms and legs which dogs had dug up near the fence." [45]
Convenience as well as respect dictated that so far as possible the dead be collected and buried together. This particularly applied to the variuos sites used as hospitals, where numbers of men died at one place. About forty were laid to rest in a mass grave at Mt. Zion Church, wounded Union soliers who died here while the building was a field hospital. There were the thirteen Convederates, in graves marked only by native fieldstones on a rise of ground in the thick forest behind the Merritt Jones Wayside Tavern at Big Hill, including fifteen-year-old William Rhodes and Lieturenant Boren of the First Texas Artillery. What must have been a much larger number were in a plot marked only by a very small stone engraved, "Southern Dead," in what was then the southwestern corner of Ricmond Cemetery. The largest interment was a mass grave of Federals on the west side of the cemetery and a larger one along the eastern edge of the grounds where the last Union defense line ran. [46]
The number of burials in the Confederate mass grave has been variously estimated. Jonathan Truman Dorris, for many years Madison County Historian, ventured no precise number in his "Glimpses of Historic Madison County, Kentucky', r, but it was generally believed to be thirty or forty. The late Dr. John B. Floyd, Jr. of Lexington, Kentucky, however, who identified the burials in he Confederate Cemetery at the Jnes Tavern/Grant House at Big Hill and those in the Richmond Cemetery from the Compiled Military Service Records in the National Archives, put the figure much higher, at 174. His list, however, included men who died some weeks after the battle, some of whom were from reigments that got there later, and since it appears to be a complete or very close to complete listing, quite likely includes the names of men who were buried by local residents in other parts of the county. [47]
It also appears likely that the Union soldiers who were killed in or near the cemetery on the afternoon of Agusut 30 - Dorris gave their number as sixty-one - were buried on a family lot belonging to Anthony Rollins Burnam on the west side of the grounds. A few days or weeks later, the forty or so bodies from Mt. Zion were exhumed and brought to Richmond, along with some others from scattered graves elsewhere, and laid to rest on a larger lot on the eastern side of the cemetery, thus undoubtedly concentrating many of the Federal dead in that one cemetery. How may others remained in individual graves scattered from Big Hill to north of Richmond is impossible to determine. Fanily tradition points to various spots on several farms in the county, and three burials at the entrance of the Berea Cemetery, supposed to be wounded Union soldiers who died in private homes in the Glades, are recorded as probably the first interments on those grounds. [48]
On June 12, 1866, the Department Quartermaster of Kentucky reported to the Quartermaster General of the United States that: "At Richmond, Madison Co., Ky., about one hundred and seventy five (175), soldiers have been buried on the Battlefield, in and around the town cemetery," adding that "This cemetery is enclosed, is in ordinary condition and still used. Head boards were placed over a portion of the soldiers graves, but the following only can now be identified, "with a list of thirty-one names, some of whom as in the case with Floyd's Confederate list, died long after the battle and were in regiments that did not fight at Richmond, Dorris finally put the total number of Union dead in the Cemetery at 241 [49]
As was to often the case, the burials were probably shallow; when a Rhode Island regiment camped in the walnut grove at the cemetery in May of the next year, one soldier later recalled, "to our suprise we had our tents pitched directly over graves of the victims of that engagement for we burroughed [sic] down to some of them." The bodies from the Union mass graves in Richmond Cemetery were moved in July 1868, to Camp Nelson National Cemetery south of Nichlasville in Jessamine County, where the early official cemetery records indicate the difficulties of identification and accurate counting. In 1894 the superintendent wrote to French Tipton in Richmond, "I will this day forward you the number of soldiers that were killed at Richmond, Ky and buried in the National Cemetery at Camp Nelson, Ky. There are 514 buried here, 123 of that amount is known, the rest unknown. The latest official tally of those buried there is 211 unknown and 33 known, all listed as being buried in Section F in July 1868. [50]
[45] "Reminiscenses of the Battle of Richmond," French Tipton Papers. The presence of severed arms and legs suggests that after the fighting there must have been a surgeons' station set up close by.
[46] The research of Dr. John B. Floyd, Jr., M.D., Lexington Ky. in individual soldier's records in the National Archives located Boren's burial in the Big Hill Cemetery; there is some evidence tha he may have been buried on the field near where he fell.
[47] See "The Richmond Cemetery," in Dorris, "Glimpses", 313-17. In private conversation with the author, Dorris agreed with the thirty to forty estimate. See also John B. Floyd, Jr. M. D., papers and National Archives microfilm collection, in the author's possession, Berea, Kentucky. Floyd's listing, in his own handwriting, appears as Reel No. 1, Reel 824, Civil War Microfilm Collection, in the Tennessee State Archives, where it has on occasion been mistaken for an original Civil War listing.
[48] Dorris, "Glimpses", 315; Jerry Parrish Dimitrov and Charles Cortlandt Hay III, eds., "Inventory of Burials": Berea (Kentucky) Cemetery, Inc. (Richmond, Ky.: Madison County Historical Society, 1993), vii, x.
[49] Brevit Col. R. [S.?] [Bathilder or Rathilder?] to Brevit Major-General M. C. Meigs, June 12, 1866, Record Group 393, National Archives; Doris, "Glimpses", 315.
[50] William P. [Hopkins?], Letter to the Postmaster of Richmond, 1886, French Tipton Papers; S. S. Cole, Suprintencent, Camp Nelson National Cemeery, to French Tipton, October 27, 1894, Frnch Tipton Papers; David G. Dimmick, Cemetery Director, Camp Nelson National Cemetery, to the author, July 29, 1991, author's files.
SCOURCE: Pages 171,172 and 233, "The Day the Ripe Pears Fell - The Battle of Richmond, Kentucky" by D. Warren Lambert, ISBN 0-9615162-3-2.