I'm still working through my mixed feelings about Richmond's Oakwood Cemetery. I was particularly interested in two monuments there. The first is a very small slate headstone to W.W. Mitchell, a soldier from Georgia. (Click here for a picture of it.) I was lying on the ground right in front it of when I took this, so it looks larger than it actually is. It's not even a foot tall; I wonder if there is a smaller headstone anywhere? There are certainly markers that are smaller — that have only a number or letter on them, but I'm not sure that I've seen a smaller headstone that identifies a person.
There is another monument, though, that I want to talk about — one of the larger ones in the cemetery, put up in the late nineteenth century. The image of it is at right. It has a small relief of a soldier on the side. It is, I think, the only image of a Confederate soldier in the cemetery — which is somewhat odd given that there are thousands of Confederate soliders buried here.