Southern Memorial Association

The view from East Mountain out over the valley where Fayetteville now sprawls is impressive. On a clear autumn day, you can see the courthouse, old Washington County Jail, all 15 stories of the Raddison Hotel, and just a glimpse of one of Old Main's towers. Imagine how surprised the Confederate dead would be if they could sit up from their bare wooden boxes and look out over the land they fought to keep. Some 622 gray-clad patriots who fought and fell in the Civil War battles of Prairie Grove, Pea Ridge and elsewhere around this corner of Arkansas lie together in a quiet grove on East Mountain. Their history is written on stones that mark their heads, on the statue that guards them, in the rough hewn rocks that surround them.