This impressive statue stands in the midst of a special circular section of the Prospect Hill Cemetery on North George Street near York, Pennsylvania. Scores of Union soldiers who died at the U.S. Army Military Hospital in downtown York are buried in concentric circles around the statue, and their names are carved into curved flat marble stones. Most are from Pennsylvania or New York regiments, and a fair number of those interred were mortally wounded at the Battle of Gettysburg.
During the Civil War, more than 14,000 wounded or ill men were treated at the military hospital, making it among the largest in Pennsylvania. Many of those who expired at the hospital (or at the train station while awaiting transport to the hospital as in the case of three men critically wounding at Gettysburg) were sent home to their families, but in several cases, either no word came from the family as to the body's disposition, or they could not afford to have their loved one sent home. Hence, the dead ended up in York's main cemetery at the time.
