Cedar Creek • Tour the Battlefield • Battle Maps • The Armies
The monument to Confederate Major General Stephen Dodson Ramseur (West Point Class of 1860) is at the entrance to the Belle Grove Plantation where he died, after being mortally wounded in the final stages of the battle.
General Ramseur was one of the best brigade and division commanders in the Army of Northern Virginia. He was trying to hold his men together as the Confederate line disintegrated at the close of the battle. Hit in the arm and having had two horses shot from under him, he mounted a third horse only to be shot through both lungs.
He was sent to the rear but his ambulance was captured in the confusion of the retreat. Ramseur was brought to Sheridan’s headquarters at Belle Grove. Union friends from the days before the war visited him as the surgeons did what they could. He died after leaving messages for his wife and baby daughter, whose birth he had learned of only the day before the battle.
One of the Cedar Creek and Belle Grove National Historical Park’s excellent interpretive programs examines Ramseur’s life along with that of Union Colonel Charles Lowell, who was also killed in the battle.
From the tablet at the base of the monument:
Esse quam vider*
Northwest of this tablet 800 yards,
is the Belle Grove House in which died
October 20, 1864,
of wounds received at Cedar Creek October 19, 1864,
Maj.-Gen. Stephen Dodson Ramseur, C.S.A.
A native of North Carolina, he resigned from
the United States Army in 1861, and entering
the Confederate States Army as a Lieutenant
rose to rank of Major-General at the age of 27.
Erected 1919 by
The North Carolina Historical Commission
The North Carolina Division, U.D.C.
The Latin phrase at the top of the tablet translates “to be, rather than to seem to be.” It became the official motto of the State of North Carolina in 1893.
Map and directions to the monument
The monument to Major General Ramseur is on the northwest side of the Valley Pike (U.S. 11) at the entrance to the Belle Grove Plantation just south of Middletown, Virginia. (39°00’53.9″N 78°18’04.2″W)