Winchester National Cemetery: The Valley's Union Dead

Winchester changed hands more than seventy times during the Civil War, making the Shenandoah Valley one of the most fought-over corridors in the conflict. The human cost of that fighting is concentrated here. Winchester National Cemetery was dedicated on April eighth, eighteen sixty-six, and contains more than fifty-four hundred graves of Union soldiers, gathered from temporary burial sites across the Valley and from as far away as Harpers Ferry, Martinsburg, and Romney in what is now West Virginia.

Fourteen commemorative monuments stand among the headstones, each dedicated to a Union regiment that fought in the major Shenandoah Valley campaigns of eighteen sixty-two and eighteen sixty-four. The land was bought from local farmer Jacob Baker for fifteen hundred dollars, and legally transferred to the federal government in eighteen seventy, the ground where so many already lay. The cemetery remains an active national cemetery under the care of the Department of Veterans Affairs.