McClenny Family Website

Fredericksburg, Virginia Cemetery

On March 21, 1997, I visited Fredericksburg, VA as I had previously discovered that a McClenny family member had been killed there during the Civil War.  Not only did I find the one I was looking for - I found another as well! 

A roster listing the known dead is available at the Fredericksburg Battlefield Visitor Center located on Lafayette Boulevard. There is a Fredericksburg, Virginia City Cemetery and Confederate Cemetery located at the intersection of Amelia Street and Washington Avenue.

The cemetery is completely surrounded by a brick wall and large steel gates. Six Confederate generals and more than 3,300 Southern soldiers are buried here with 2,184 of them unknown.

The Ladies Memorial Association, a group of Fredericksburg women, purchased the land for a Confederate cemetery in 1867. They had soldiers re-interred in new locations adjoining the Fredericksburg City Cemetery. As time passed, headstones were supplied by various Southern states to replace the original cedar posts.

A statue of a Confederate soldier was erected in the middle of the graves in 1884.  The cemetery has a unique layout in that there are four distinct sections laid out in the design of the Confederate flag around the monument. Many headstones can no longer be read, but cemetery records indicated there were two McClenny's buried therein.

Here is a picture of the cemetery layout, which also shows the General's graves. On my second visit to the cemetery my wife found the headstones for both McClenny family members. I had searched for a couple of hours on my earlier visit and was very frustrated, when I failed in my mission to capture their gravesites in a picture, but now I have pictures of both of them. Whoever laid out the cemetery did a beautiful job, but their row 16 and my row 14, 15, 16, 17 or 18 would not produce the tombstones I was searching for.

My wife discovered that the rows of graves are numbered from back to front rather than front to back as I had expected. William Henry McClenney of Texas is buried in section 14, row 16.


Richard Henry McClenny of Virginia is buried in section 12, row 16. He was born on 09-11-1841 and died on 05-06-1864 in the Battle of the Wilderness. He enlisted as a Private at Tanner's Crossroads in the 16th regiment, company B of the Virginia Infantry.

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