Excavation at a battlefield cemetery in Virginia finds a buried road from the 1800s

A search for unmarked graves at a Civil War battlefield cemetery in Virginia has turned up something completely unexpected: a buried road.

The Northeast Archeological Resources Program announced the find Monday on Facebook and added that a brick-lined culvert was also located nearby.

Both features were buried near rows of graves at Fredericksburg and Spotsylvania County Battlefields National Military Park in northern Virginia, the program said.

Archaeologists were using ground-penetrating radar and magnetometer surveys to find unmarked graves at the time of the discovery.

It’s believed the road — or large “path” — may have led to the spot where a Civil War cemetery monument was “proposed during the early design of the cemetery,” officials said. However, the monument was never installed “and through time the road was buried.”

The culvert was discovered when geophysics indicated “an unknown feature” buried nearby, officials said.

Details were not provided on the size of the road, or how long it might have been.

No unmarked soldier’s graves were found by the excavations, which began in late June, Northeast Archeological Resources Program officials said.

Fredericksburg National Cemetery was created by Congress in July 1865 “to honor the Federal soldiers who died on the battlefields or from disease in camp,” according to the National Park Service. There are 15,000 U.S. soldiers buried in the cemetery, and most served in the Civil War, officials say.

“The site chosen was Marye’s Heights, the formidable Confederate position which had proven so impregnable to repeated Federal attacks on December 13, 1862,” the NPS says.

Fredericksburg National Cemetery is considered full and hasn’t hosted “a soldier or veteran” burial since 1949. But archaeologists have been searching the past few weeks for a spot to host one more burial vault.

The new grave will hold the remains of Union soldiers found buried “near the Rowe–Goolrick House, which served as a hospital during the Battle of Fredericksburg,” according to the National Park Service. Historians have not said exactly how many soldiers are included in the remains, which were found in 2015, the NPS said.

“Projects like this show just how complex park sites can be even just a few centimeters below the surface,” the Northeast Archeological Resources Program said in its Facebook post. “Doing archaeology in advance of any excavation on federal land provides new interpretive materials and ensures that important work, such as reinterment, can proceed without disturbance.”

This story was originally published July 13, 2021 at 1:02 PM with the headline "Excavation at a battlefield cemetery in Virginia finds a buried road from the 1800s."