Fredericksburg National Cemetery Union Hospital Burial Discovery

The Fredericksburg National Cemetery sits on Marye's Heights, ground that saw some of the worst fighting of the Battle of Fredericksburg in December 1862. The federal government developed it after the war to hold Union burials from the area's battlefields — soldiers killed in a city that sat halfway between the two opposing capitals, a geography that made Fredericksburg a recurring target. Many of the dead were never identified; mass graves are part of what the cemetery contains. The cemetery is part of the Fredericksburg and Spotsylvania National Military Park, which preserves portions of several Civil War battlefields in the region. Come not for ceremony but for the plain fact of the ground itself — what happened here, and what it cost.