Maple Hill Cemetery

Also known as Helena Confederate Cemetery, this burial ground holds the remains of Civil War soldiers who fought in the Battle of Helena on July 4, 1863.

Maple Hill Cemetery sprawls across thirty-seven acres on the east side of Crowley's Ridge in Helena, Arkansas, overlooking the Mississippi River -- a landscape shaped by one of the bloodiest days in the state's history. The cemetery was established in 1865 as a direct result of the destruction of Helena's original burial ground, known as Graveyard Hill, by the shells and gunfire of the Battle of Helena on July 4, 1863. On that Independence Day, over 7,500 Confederate troops under Lieutenant General Theophilus Holmes launched the last major Confederate offensive in Arkansas, attacking roughly 4,100 Union defenders commanded by Major General Benjamin Prentiss. By 11:00 AM the fighting was over and the Confederates withdrew, having suffered 1,636 casualties -- 173 dead, 687 wounded, and 776 missing or captured, representing more than twenty percent of Holmes's entire force. The battle has been called one of the least remembered engagements of the Civil War because it occurred the same day Vicksburg surrendered and the day after Gettysburg.

The Confederate Cemetery occupies a one-acre section on a high hill in Maple Hill's southwest corner, established in 1869 when the Phillips County Memorial Association arranged for the reinterment of seventy-three known and twenty-nine unnamed Confederate soldiers who had been buried across the local area. More than one hundred soldiers now rest there, including twenty-three who fell at the Battle of Helena and six whose remains were discovered near Battery D and reburied as recently as 2005. A thirty-seven-foot granite Confederate monument, created by Muldoon and Company of Louisville, Kentucky, was dedicated on Decoration Day in 1892 and lists the battles where Arkansas troops fought. The cemetery was added to the National Register of Historic Places on May 3, 1996.

Three Confederate generals are buried in Maple Hill, each with a violent end. Major General Patrick Ronayne Cleburne, the Irish-born officer known as the "Stonewall of the West," was killed at the Battle of Franklin, Tennessee on November 30, 1864. His remains were moved from Ashwood, Tennessee to Helena in 1870 in a processional attended by former Confederate President Jefferson Davis. A marble monument featuring an Irish harp was erected in 1891. Major General Thomas C. Hindman, a pre-war Helena attorney and congressman, was assassinated on the night of September 27, 1868 when an unknown assailant fired through a window of his home while he sat with his children. The bullet struck his neck and jaw, severing his windpipe. He died the following morning at age forty. Before dying, Hindman suggested the shooting was politically motivated. Despite multiple claims of responsibility over the years -- including Louis D. Vaughn alleging he was hired by Daniel A. Linthicum, and a Georgia arsonist confessing before execution in 1876 -- the true assassin was never identified. A twenty-seven-foot granite obelisk marks his grave. Brigadier General James C. Tappan, who survived the war, died in 1906 and is also interred at Maple Hill.

The cemetery's most famous ghost belongs not to a soldier but to a dog. Dr. Emile Overton Moore was shot and killed on February 16, 1893, by Dr. Charles R. Shinault following an argument over who would treat a patient with a broken leg. Moore confronted Shinault outside, reached into his coat, and warned he would "fix him." Shinault drew his .38 revolver and fired, killing Moore instantly. The incident generated national headlines. Some suggested Shinault acted out of jealousy, while others described Moore as "a wild and reckless man and was the terror of Helena." Shinault was acquitted under a self-defense claim and went on to become president of the Arkansas Medical Association. The Moore family erected a gravestone with a bitter inscription from John P. Moore: "His errors were the errors of a man / And they stand out in bold contrast / with the time serving, two faced hippocrites / who conspired to have him murdered."

Pedro, Moore's loyal Irish Setter, refused to leave his master's grave after the funeral. For approximately two years, neighbors heard Pedro howling in the cemetery every night. Residents brought the grieving dog food and snacks when they could, but Pedro would not abandon his post. When the dog finally died, still waiting at the grave, the Moore family buried him in the same plot and added a sculpted dog atop the monument -- a stone watchdog forever guarding his master. To this day, visitors to Maple Hill report hearing the mournful howling of a dog in the cemetery when no living animal is present, as if Pedro's spirit still grieves for Dr. Moore.

Beyond Pedro's cries, the cemetery carries the weight of its Civil War dead. Confederate soldiers have been seen marching in formation through the cemetery grounds at dawn, their gray uniforms fading into the morning mist rising from the Mississippi Delta. The sounds of drums and distant cannon fire carry across the flatlands, echoing the battle that created this burial ground. Visitors who leave flowers on Confederate graves report finding them rearranged into deliberate patterns by morning. The cemetery's elaborate wrought iron entrance archway -- its posts donated in 1914, its arch added in 1975 -- frames a landscape where the living and the dead share uneasy company across thirty-seven acres of Arkansas Delta earth.