News from The Cartersville Express

 
The Cartersville Express
Cartersville, Georgia
May 20, 1869, page 2
 
Transcribed by:  
 

Malvern Hill.

A correspondent writes thus of the Confederate burial place at Malvern Hill, Virginia:

“The cemetery keeper offered to act as our guide, and after showing us the fort and its adjacent rifle pits, he escorted us to a large field on the Northwest side of the fort, and there a most terrible scene presented itself.  Thousands of Confederate soldiers who had fallen in their desperate and persistent attempts to take Fort Harrison, were buried by the Confederates where they fell.  Twenty acres or more have just been plowed up by the owner of the field, and the plowshare turned to the surface all these skeletons.  Over the whole tract the bones are strewn in profusion, and grinning skulls stare the visitors in the face on every hand.

When the farmer was questioned, he said the land was now the richest place he had, and in justification of his sacrilegious act stated that “he didn’t put ‘em there, nohow.”  We learned afterward that the bones had been taken away by the cart load and sold to fertilizing mills in Richmond.  Two humane men, too poor to do anything else, came one day while we were there and attempted to burn some of the bones to prevent the wretches from carting them off.  But a long job they will have if they attempt to burn them all.

Yet these are not the only fields of Confederate bones we have seen, not the first instance of disrespect for their dead that we have witnessed.  Perhaps they are too poor, as they plead to bury them.  Then, in the name of humanity, why do they rear a stone monument, forty-five feet square at the base, and ninety feet high, at Richmond, to the memory of the “Confederate dead” in the cemetery, and leave their bones to bleach in the field?”

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Any one who knows the fate of Van Buren Baker, formerly of Cass County, Ga., but who was living in Marion Co., Arkansas, at the beginning of the war, will greatly oblige his distressed relatives by communicating such fact to G. W. Baker, Rome, Ga.

 

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