How Few Remain
Now that I've told the narrative of of the Battle of Mill Springs, I'll go back and pick up some of the other pictures I took in and around the battlefield properties and the town of Nancy, KY.
Like, for instance, these headstones resting in the field near that monument to Confederate General Felix Zollicoffer. These don't mark anybody's actual grave, as most of the Confederates killed on this hilltop were tossed in a mass grave marked by a mound out of view to the left. That's the way these things tended to work. Survivors would bury everybody killed in a battle on site shortly after the fighting stopped. At some point within the next few years, the U.S. government would come and get the remains of the Union soldiers and move them to some honored place, sometimes a new national cemetery they'd establish within a few miles. The Confederates, meanwhile, would be left in whatever hole they'd been piled into, often without any marker at all to denote the location.
This is the kind of thing that stokes a lot of "damned Yankee" Lost Cause grumbling among Southerners, but I tend to think if you want a nice grave all to yourself with your name carved into your very own chunk of marble, then you shouldn't get yourself killed while committing acts of treason against the United States.
Both the Zollicoffer monument and the marker noting the location of the mass grave were added to this site in 1910, when this was all preserved as some local county park. The battlefield preservation association that used to run all this added these marble grave markers in 1997. There are 148 of them, each listing the name of some Confederate who died on this hill.
The text carved into the 1910 monument at the mass grave reads:
Beneath this mound rest in sleep that knows no waking more than one hundred Confederate soldiers from Tennessee, Mississippi, and Alabama who were killed in the Battle of Fishing Creek, Jan. 19, 1862. We know not who they were but the whole world knows what they were. These died far from their homes but they fill heroes graves and glory keeps ceaseless watch about their tomb.
Nobody can write purple prose the way a Lost Cause sympathizer could write it in 1910.
Also, they changed the name of this battle at some point. That monument is the only place I saw that called this the Battle of Fishing Creek.
How Few Remain
Now that I've told the narrative of of the Battle of Mill Springs, I'll go back and pick up some of the other pictures I took in and around the battlefield properties and the town of Nancy, KY.
Like, for instance, these headstones resting in the field near that monument to Confederate General Felix Zollicoffer. These don't mark anybody's actual grave, as most of the Confederates killed on this hilltop were tossed in a mass grave marked by a mound out of view to the left. That's the way these things tended to work. Survivors would bury everybody killed in a battle on site shortly after the fighting stopped. At some point within the next few years, the U.S. government would come and get the remains of the Union soldiers and move them to some honored place, sometimes a new national cemetery they'd establish within a few miles. The Confederates, meanwhile, would be left in whatever hole they'd been piled into, often without any marker at all to denote the location.
This is the kind of thing that stokes a lot of "damned Yankee" Lost Cause grumbling among Southerners, but I tend to think if you want a nice grave all to yourself with your name carved into your very own chunk of marble, then you shouldn't get yourself killed while committing acts of treason against the United States.
Both the Zollicoffer monument and the marker noting the location of the mass grave were added to this site in 1910, when this was all preserved as some local county park. The battlefield preservation association that used to run all this added these marble grave markers in 1997. There are 148 of them, each listing the name of some Confederate who died on this hill.
The text carved into the 1910 monument at the mass grave reads:
Beneath this mound rest in sleep that knows no waking more than one hundred Confederate soldiers from Tennessee, Mississippi, and Alabama who were killed in the Battle of Fishing Creek, Jan. 19, 1862. We know not who they were but the whole world knows what they were. These died far from their homes but they fill heroes graves and glory keeps ceaseless watch about their tomb.
Nobody can write purple prose the way a Lost Cause sympathizer could write it in 1910.
Also, they changed the name of this battle at some point. That monument is the only place I saw that called this the Battle of Fishing Creek.