The Stonewall Confederate Cemetery lies adjacent to Mount Hebron Cemetery on the east side of Winchester, and contains the remains of 829 Confederate soldiers who died in the city's many engagements or in the military hospitals that Winchester operated throughout the war. The cemetery was established by the Ladies Confederate Memorial Association in the 1860s, a pattern repeated across the South as women's organizations took on the work of burying and commemorating the dead that state and federal governments were not willing to fund.
The cemetery is smaller and less formal than the nearby Winchester National Cemetery, with older and more varied markers. A central monument, erected in 1879, honors the Confederate dead with an inscription that reflects the Lost Cause narrative that would dominate Southern memorialization for generations. Whether you find the monument's language offensive or affecting, the graves themselves represent real casualties from a conflict that began and ended very close to here. The two cemeteries — Union and Confederate — standing side by side make Winchester one of the more thought-provoking places to reckon with the Civil War in the Shenandoah Valley.