Salisbury National Cemetery

Site of the Salisbury Confederate Prison, with mass graves of 11,000 Union soldiers

Salisbury National Cemetery sits on the site of the Salisbury Confederate Prison, the Confederacy's largest prison for Union soldiers. Between 1861 and 1865, more than 15,000 men were held in a compound built for 2,500; over 11,000 died of disease, exposure, and starvation, and are buried here in eighteen long trenches.

The trenches are still visible — long, grass-covered mounds that run in parallel lines across the cemetery — and a federal monument lists every regiment whose men lie below. It is a quiet, sobering place, well kept and almost always empty, set just south of the historic downtown. The 1908 ornamental gates and the small visitor information board explain the prison's grim history.

things to do sight
A story
After the war, walking the trenches with a quartermaster, the poet Walt Whitman wrote of Salisbury that 'the dead are mostly in long trenches, the trenches sodded over with grass, very little has been written about it — much has been written and printed about the more famous prisons.'