Oak Hill Cemetery in Evansville, Vanderburgh County, Indiana, is a historic cemetery developed in 1853 and containing about 175 acres. The cemetery preserves its original pastoral tranquility. The Victorian period concern for creating an evocative, contemplative atmosphere has been carefully maintained to the present day, making Oak Hill the City’s premier public burial ground and an important cultural statement.
Perhaps the most hallowed ground in the Cemetery contains the remains of soldiers who died in battle or in Evansville hospitals from battle-incurred wounds during the Civil War. There are 574 burials in the Civil War section (Section 24) with the majority dying from disease in the military hospitals. Six buried there died on the battlefield and were brought back to this section, although several from Shiloh and Ft. Donaldson received wounds and eventually died at Evansville. And of the 574 there are a fair number of the burials done after the Civil War by G.A.R. Farragut Post 27. Click here for more on the graves at this cemetery.
While most of the Civil War remains are Union men, twenty-four are Confederate soldiers. In 1904, the Fitzhugh Lee Chapter of the Daughters of the Confederacy erected a monument in remembrance of the 24 soldiers who died for the South. “The chapters of the organization in nearly every city of the South have already erected similar monuments . . . in the public squares and parks of many of the towns,” the Evansville Courier wrote in 1903. “The Evansville ladies feel they cannot afford to be behind in the movement and are elated at their success.” Most of the dead were injured in the Battle of Shiloh in April 1862. Injured Confederate soldiers were brought to Evansville by boat alongside injured Union men. They were buried quickly at Oak Hill with the graves marked with painted wooded slabs that have long since rotten away.
Not to be outdone by the Confederate memorial, the Women’s Relief Corps (an auxiliary of the G.A.R.) erected an even larger memorial for local Union dead in 1909. The United States government appropriated $160 for a flagpole in 1895 and again in 1900 for about $1000. The Government also donated the four 8″ ordinance in the section.