Our National Cemeteries: Fredericksburg National Cemetery, Where Valor Proudly Sleeps

While we’re talking “national cemeteries,” I want to take a moment to give a shout-out to my friend, historian Don Pfanz, who wrote a fantastic book about the history of Fredericksburg National Cemetery, Where Valor Proudly Sleeps. Southern Illinois University Press published the book as part of our Engaging the Civil War Series. (You can order here.)

Back in “the day” when I volunteered at Fredericksburg and Spotsylvania National Military Park, one of the resources we had behind the visitor center’s desk was Don’s original manuscript for this book. Don was the staff historian at the park, and he wrote the book as a reference manual so that if visitors came in with questions about the cemetery, we’d have the answers at our finger tips. We called it “Don’s cemetery book,” and I loved it. Anyone who spent any amount of time with it loved it. Don had crammed it full of all the pertinent facts and figures but also wicked cool stories—stories about its history but also about some of the folks buried there. It was a gem.

I pushed hard to include the book in the Engaging the Civil War Series because I believed in it so strongly. I recommend it to anyone who’s not only interested in Fredericksburg National Cemetery specifically, but to anyone interested in the development of the national cemetery system generally.