Cold Harbor • Tour the Battlefield • Monuments & Markers • The Armies
The “Battle of Cold Harbor – Confederate Main Line” monument is about 50 yards east of the Cold Harbor Visitor Center area at Richmond National Battlefield Park.
The view looks east toward the Union lines. Cold Harbor Road is on the right and the Cold Harbor Walking Tour trail is on the left.
This is one of 59 roadside markers erected to mark Civil War battlefields in the Richmond area in the 1920s by the Battlefield Markers Association. Historian Douglas Southall Freeman wrote most of the inscriptions and headed up the effort, and the markers came to be known as ‘Freeman Markers.’
They were the first Virginia roadside makers, designed to be viewed from an automobile. They consist of a cast iron plate set in a concrete capstone donated on a rough granite base. This is marker number 27 in the series, most of whom survive today.
Text from the monument:
Battle of Cold Harbor
The Confederate Main Line
Here Longstreet’s Corps, with Breckinridge
and A.P. Hill’s Corps to the southward, repulsed
on June 3, 1864, fourteen assaults from the East
against the confederate main line. The federal
losses, about 7000, were the heaviest ever
sustained in America in so brief an action.
Placed by the
Confederate Memorial Literary Society.
Map and directions to the “Battle of Cold Harbor – Confederate Main Line” monument
The monument is about 50 yards east of the Cold Harbor Visitor Center area at Richmond National Battlefield Park. (37.58541° N, 77.286378° W)