Battle of Fredericksburg • Tour the Battlefield • Monuments & Markers • Armies
The Stephens Family Cemetery wayside marker is in the Sunken Road, at Stop One on the Battlefield Auto Tour. The marker is a short distance from the Stephens House wayside marker and the Martha Stevens monument.
From the marker:
Stephens Family Cemetery
Buried here are eight members of the Innis, Mazeen, and Stephens families, including the most famous of them all: Martha Stephens.
Local children knew Martha Stephens as “Granny.” They also remembered her ever-present apron, the pipe often clenched in her teeth, and her matronly form. But Martha Stephens was no typical “Granny.” At the time when women rarely owned property, she owned no fewer than seven tracts, including a 92-acre farm in Spotsylvania County. For a time, she ran a saloon in her home. A local resident remembered her as “uneducated [and] too free and outspoken in what she said and did and how she did it.”
When she died in 1888 at the age of 68, the local paper called her a “genial spirit” and recalled wartime efforts to aid the wounded during the Battle of Fredericksburg. “Her ministrations will never be forgotten by those who survive,” the paper noted, “and companions of those who died will ever cherish her memory.”
Location of the marker
The marker is on the east side of the Sunken Road Trail about 250 yards north of the Visitor Center. It is on the east side of the trail that branches off from the Sunken Road and heads toward the Stephens House. (38°17’43.5″N 77°28’05.8″W)