Florence National Cemetery

The Florence National Cemetery

803 E. National Cemetery Road, Florence, SC 29501

The need to inter deceased prisoners imposed itself as soon as the trains began to arrive at Florence in mid-September of 1864. Numbers were taken from the trains already dead, and these were placed into shallow graves alongside the tracks south of town. For the first three weeks that prisoners were concentrated at Florence, they were kept in a large open field, a short distance to the east of the tracks that had probably served as a training ground for Confederate volunteers in 1861. A "hospital" of sorts was constituted, with the sick placed on the bare ground in the shade of neighboring trees. During these three weeks, approximately 400 prisoners died, and were buried in trenches on the south side of the present-day National Cemetery Road. By the time the Stockade opened on October 2nd, 1864, burials in this impromptu cemetery seem to have come to an end. The land hereabouts is low and in places the water table is high. Perhaps the decision was taken to continue burying in more substantial ground.

In any event, a protocol was developed. Friends of a dead man would carry his corpse to the gate of the Stockade where, every morning members of the burial squad would load bodies into a wagon and transport them to what is now the Florence National Cemetery. The living would affix a piece of paper to the corpse, identifying the dead man as to name, state, regiment, company, and rank. To conserve labor, the squad excavated great trenches where the bodies would be laid shoulder to shoulder in the ground. Since the living needed the tattered clothing more than did the dead, the corpses were stripped prior to burial. Indeed, it is likely that most of the clothing was appropriated by the man's friends before his corpse was ever transported to the gate.

The burial squad kept a detailed ledger ascribing to each man a distinct number that corresponded to a numbered stake placed at his head. The graves of a small number of individuals - generally thought to have been Freemasons - where given more detailed stakes of wood. These markers eventually resulted in actual named tombstones being placed over their heads, this after the burial register was lost at the evacuation of the Stockade.

A single soldier stands out from the mass of the Stockade victims: a woman who came to be known as "Florena Budwin" in the post-war period. Later oral tradition made her the wife of a Pennsylvania officer, who had enlisted in disguise in order accompany her husband to war. The husband supposedly died at Andersonville, and Florena found herself on an evacuation train to Florence. The story was later embroidered to having her sex discovered when she was admitted to the Stockade hospital. Upon recovery, she supposedly labored several more months as a nurse. Local ladies furthermore brought her dresses to wear. But the fact remains that no diarist noted her presence at the Stockade either before or after her death. So we are left to conclude that she was discovered to be a woman at the time she died. Early 20th-century images of the cemetery show a discreet distance between her tombstone and the "unknown" marble posts that marked the graves of her male neighbors - a final mark of respect accorded her by the burial squad.