Hidden Secrets of Kentucky: Discovery of a Mass Grave Could Rewrite Civil War History of Black Union Soldiers
Searching For The Mass Grave In Simpsonville, Kentucky
The effort to locate the mass grave of Company E started with Jerry Miller, a retired state representative and local historian who set out to locate where the Union men had been buried. Working with Philip Mink, an archaeologist at the University of Kentucky, he pored over historical documents in hopes of finding the grave. Though they investigated a local African American cemetery in 2008, they were unable to locate a mass grave.
But in 2023, Miller came across a map from 1936 that marked a Civil War burial mound at a local farm.
Jerry MillerA map of the possible Civil War mass grave location in Simpsonville, Kentucky.
According to Live Science, the current owner of this farm confirmed that his father and grandfather had told him that their land held a Civil War grave, today located in one of his soybean fields. And he agreed to let Miller and Mink take a look to see if they could find it.
Using a drone-mounted magnetometer and terrestrial ground-penetrating radar, a team of archaeologists was able to find an “anomaly” in the farmer’s soybean fields that was five feet deep, 13 feet wide, and 65 feet long. While speaking at a conference for the Society for American Archaeology in April 2025, Mink said that this was “consistent with a mass grave.”
In fact, the archaeologists found two anomalies. According to Mink, this possibly suggests that the 14 men who died immediately were buried first, and the eight men who perished from their wounds later were buried in a second grave nearby.
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