Editor’s note: Bob Milstead is a native Washingtonian now retired and living in Costa Rica. He reads my blog regularly and was kind enough to share his story of his relative, a Confederate soldier, is buried at Arlington National Cemetery.

By Bob Milstead

My relative got in there through quite a different route than specified in the current criteria. He fought against the current government and was imprisoned by it after being captured at Culp’s Hill in 1863. Private Joseph H. Milstead, C.S.A is buried at the confederate veterans memorial at Arlington, one of around 300 confederate graves there, in grave 132.

The Confederate Memorial

Most confederate soldiers that were buried in Arlington were relocated by their families, feeling that Arlington, being taken from the family of Robert E. Lee to make a cemetery was not the place where they should be buried. But some were either unknown, or without family, or for some other reason were not relocated. In the early 1900s, when the idea for the memorial was gaining steam, there were very few confederates still buried in the cemetery, around a hundred as I recall, and the design of the monument was to be surrounded by over 300. What to do?

At the time, there was a home for confederate veterans in Pikesville, just south of Baltimore. Maryland Line Confederate Soldiers’ Home. Those organizing the memorial approached soldiers living in this home, and possibly in other homes around the country, and asked for volunteers to be buried at the memorial after their deaths. This is how, in 1924, 59 years and 1 month after the end of the war, and ten years after the dedication of the memorial, Joseph Milstead, a confederate soldier, came to be buried in Arlington.

Postscript: Interesting story, which I am sure you have also heard, is that all the confederate stones are pointed on top, while all the rest of the stones are rounded.  The rationale was “supposedly” to keep Union soldiers from sitting on the stones, although I think that is probably a little exaggerated.

A little more on Joseph H. Milstead.  He and a friend, John Henry Chunn, traveled from Anne Arundel County in Maryland, probably mostly on foot to Richmond, to enlist.  They marched from there, up the Shenandoah valley,  and fought in the 2nd battle of Manassas, before continuing on to Gettysburg.  After capture at Culp’s Hill, he was in Point Lookout prison by September.  He spent the rest of the war there, and in June, 1865 he marched to Richmond with the rest of the prisoners to be paroled.  Imagine, after a year and a half, imprisoned very close to your own home to have to march right past it and 100 miles beyond, just to turn around and hike back.