Centenary Confederate Cemetery

A college dormitory where Methodist students slept became a hospital ward where Confederate soldiers died. Centenary College closed its doors in 1861; the buildings didn't stay empty long. Eighty-five men are buried here — some with names on stones, some without — all of whom died from wounds or disease inside what had been student housing two years earlier. The cemetery sits on the same campus ground the college once occupied, a short walk from the Centenary State Historic Site. You need both to understand what happened: the site shows you the building that shifted from educating ministers to treating the dying, and the cemetery shows you where that shift ended. The graves are the punctuation on a sentence the college never intended to write.