In Oakwood Cemetery, Richmond, Virginia, most of the Confederate dead, known and unknown, moulder in graves marked only by numbered blocks of granite. That doesn’t mean they’re lost. The National Park Service, as my father remarked recently, is “God” when it comes to locating CW soldiers, and is the first place to turn for locating CW graves. My friend Ben Cleary, a former NPS ranger, located for me the grave of Abner Stokes Haire, a Confederate soldier whose death made way for my own ancestor (story here). When I went to find the grave, by chance I met F. Lee Hart, III, of the Sons of Confederate Veterans. He helped me find the stone and described the arrangement of the three men buried around it. Abner Stokes Haire’s grave is numbered 17; he lies to the right of the marker as you face it.

Haire died at Moore Hospital in Richmond. The hospital site, at  25^th and Main, is now a vacant lot. Ben referred to it as a “North Carolina” hospital, because they brought many NC soldiers there. The battlefield where Haire sustained his mortal wounds was about 10 miles away. How sad! Maybe poor Haire and many other boys would have lived to see their families again, had they not been forced to endure the long, rough wagon journey.