Beech Grove Confederate Cemetery

This cemetery predates the Civil War but is best known as the site where volunteers, led by Major William Hume, reburied Confederate dead from the Battle of Hoover’s Gap.

Located off Interstate 24 roughly halfway between Murfreesboro and Manchester, the Beech Grove Confederate Cemetery traces its beginnings much earlier than the Civil War. It began as a burial ground for pioneers, and many of the early families in the area were laid to rest here. The cemetery expanded in 1866 when a group of Confederate veterans under the leadership of Major William Hume took on the task of honoring fellow soldiers who fell at the Battle of Hoover’s Gap by disinterring them from their scattered graves and re-interring them in the cemetery. The battle, three years earlier on June 24-26, 1863, was a Federal victory with an estimated 200 Confederates wounded or killed. Confederate veterans returning to their homes in the vicinity of Hoover’s Gap found their homesteads in various states of disrepair with no remaining livestock. Adding to the depressing state of their community were the scattered shallow graves that had been hastily dug for the battle’s fallen soldiers. Some graves were so shallow, in fact, that the remains protruded from the earth. The veterans assembled and began the process of disinterring the remains, determining to rebury the dead in the cemetery—land owned by David Lawrence. William Hume described the work completed: “They then had a nice walnut coffin made for each and re-interred there, putting headboards on each grave, but being unable to put any name, as all were unknown. They also put a nice paling fence around the graves.” The volunteers provided the labor and materials at their own expense, “the work of love for fallen comrades.” The cemetery holds roughly 50 unknown Confederate dead, Confederate veterans buried after the war, monuments and memorials, and interpretive markers for the Tullahoma Campaign.