Historic Elmwood Cemetery at Shepherdstown, WV

By John Fox

I recently visited historic Shepherdstown, West Virginia with my wife and my parents. The town sits high above a picturesque curve on the Potomac River. A modern bridge spans the river just upstream from the stone abutments of a destroyed Civil War era bridge that forced troops from both sides to wade the stream at Boteler’s Ford [Pack Horse Ford]. We had a great lunch at the Bavarian Inn and clearly visible across the river from our table was the red-brick boyhood home of Colonel Henry Kyd Douglas. Douglas worked on the staff of numerous Confederate generals but most famously he served on Stonewall Jackson’s staff and he later wrote I Rode with Stonewall which wasn’t published until 1940, thirty-seven years after his death.

This Panhandle area of West Virginia was part of Virginia until 1863. A group of Unionists, unhappy with the seceded Virginia government at Richmond, decided to secede from the Old Dominion. Though their effort was unconstitutional, the move was supported by President Abraham Lincoln who strangely had decided two years before to launch a war against the Southern states because of their own secession. Political expediency at its finest!

When I began research for my newest book, Stuart’s Finest Hour, which details the cavalry raid that made  Jeb Stuart famous, I discovered that most of the men who came from Company F, 1^st Virginia Cavalry hailed from the area around Shepherdstown. Many of these men accompanied Stuart on the dramatic three day ride that circled the entire Union army east of Richmond in June 1862. Two 1^st Virginia troopers who had a big impact on the success of Stuart’s mission are buried in Shepherdstown’s Elmwood Cemetery.

Captain Redmond Burke was born in Ireland in 1816 which would make him forty-six years old when he served as a scout on Stuart’s mission to recon the right flank of George McClellan’s Army of the Potomac. Stuart was so happy to have Burke join his staff in December 1861 that he wrote, “Redmond Burke rode up & reported for duty yesterday – we have made a great glorification over him. He had many narrow escapes & has a wonderful set of yarns to tell.” Burke’s scouting abilities proved invaluable, but perhaps the most important skill that the Irish stone cutter brought to the mission was his bridge building skills as he and Corporal William Henry Hagan led a team that resurrected a burned Chickahominy River bridge early on June 14, 1862. Seemingly trapped, Stuart’s 1200 tired and anxious cavalrymen waited to cross the rain-swollen river expecting all the while to hear gunshots from approaching Union cavalry.

Early in the war, Stuart discovered Hagan’s talent for scrounging needed equipment and food items and appointed him to be in charge of the cavalry staff escort, which ensured that he would always be close. The large hairy man continued to excel and after the June 1862 raid he was promoted to a lieutenant’s position as the staff commissary and then the quartermaster.

The bodies of Burke and Hagan lie near each other next to the Confederate section in Elmwood Cemetery. Burke came home to visit family and was ambushed by Union troops on November 24, 1862. Hagan, who lived in Shepherdstown as a young man, survived the war and was buried here when he died in 1895.

However, the most visited grave along the green-grassed hill of this historic spot is the grave of Colonel Douglas. When the war ended he returned to Shepherdstown only to be arrested for having his photograph taken in his Confederate uniform. This “violation” cost him three months at Fort Delaware military prison. He later practiced law in Winchester, Virginia and then moved his practice to Hagerstown, Maryland where he died of tuberculosis in 1903.

The Elmwood Cemetery is open daily and it sits on the south side of Shepherdstown on Kearneysville Pike [Rt. 480].