The Unknown Confederate Dead Monument in Perryville is located in the vicinity of Perryville, in Boyle County, Kentucky, United States, in the Goodknight Cemetery, a small family cemetery on private land. It is presumed to have been constructed around the year 1928, sixty-six years after the Battle of Perryville on October 8, 1862, in which the Confederate soldiers buried here anonymously died. In total, 532 Confederates died at the battle, but it is unknown how many of this number are buried here.
The headstone is approximately seven feet (2.1 m) tall, and is made of a marble and granite composite. It has an 18-inch (46 cm) tall marble scalloped decorative cap, a granite body six inches (15 cm) thick with an inscription, stating that it honors the unknown number of Confederate soldiers buried here anonymously, and a marble base of 4 by 2 feet (120 by 61 cm). Despite being on private property, it was the federal government that erected the monument.
On July 17, 1997, the Unknown Confederate Dead Monument in Perryville was one of sixty different monuments related to the Civil War in Kentucky placed on the National Register of Historic Places, as part of the Civil War Monuments of Kentucky Multiple Property Submission. Three other monuments on this Multiple Property Submission are also in Boyle County. Two of them are in the nearby Perryville Battlefield State Historic Site by the visitor center: the Confederate Monument in Perryville and the Union Monument in Perryville. The other is in downtown Danville, Kentucky: the Confederate Monument in Danville. Many of the other memorials in graveyards have numerous unknown soldiers, but this is the only one which has no soldiers with known names.
Famous quotes containing the words unknown, confederate, dead and/or monument:
“Within the regions of the air,
Compassed about with heavens fair,
Great tracts of land there may be found
Enriched with fields and fertile ground;
Where many numerous hosts
In those far distant coasts,
For other great and glorious ends,
Inhabit, my yet unknown friends.”
—Thomas Traherne (1636–1674)
“Figure a man’s only good for one oath at a time. I took mine to the Confederate States of America.”
—Frank S. Nugent (1908–1965)
“I love man-kind, but I hate the institutions of the dead unkind. Men execute nothing so faithfully as the wills of the dead, to the last codicil and letter. They rule this world, and the living are but their executors. Such foundation too have our lectures and our sermons, commonly.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“I hope there will be no effort to put up a shaft or any monument of that sort in memory of me or of the other women who have given themselves to our work. The best kind of a memorial would be a school where girls could be taught everything useful that would help them to earn an honorable livelihood; where they could learn to do anything they were capable of, just as boys can. I would like to have lived to see such a school as that in every great city of the United States.”
—Susan B. Anthony (1820–1906)