Prospect Hill Cemetery is located a short distance south of downtown Brattleboro, Vermont.  The cemetery contains a soldiers’ lot with the graves of 19 Union soldiers who died while under care at Brattleboro’s military hospital.  Today, the town of Brattleboro manages the cemetery, and the Department of Veterans Affairs oversees the soldiers’ lot.

The cemetery, located along the banks of the Connecticut River, dates to the late 1700s.  The first interment in the “Old Village Burying Ground” occurred in 1796. The town acquired additional parcels for expansion through 1869 and gave the cemetery the name Prospect Hill.

Shortly after the first volleys of the Civil War in 1861, Brattleboro’s town fairgrounds transformed into a military campground. The military camp prepared the state’s First and Second Brigades for combat on the Civil War front lines. In early 1863, work began to convert the barracks and other buildings into a military hospital. Governor Frederick Holbrook personally traveled to Washington to convince President Lincoln and the Secretary of War to establish a hospital in Brattleboro for the care of Vermont soldiers injured in the war.  Between June 1863 and October 1865, Brattleboro’s U.S. General Hospital treated more than 4,000 patients.

In a history recounted by Governor Holbrook, 95 patients died while under care at the hospital. Interments were initially placed in the barrack’s cemetery. In 1869, the Federal Government purchased a 1,500-square-foot lot in Prospect Hill Cemetery, and later transferred the remains of soldiers from the barracks cemetery to the lot in Prospect Hill.  Today the soldiers’ lot contains the graves of 19 Union soldiers.

Many of the town’s business leaders and prominent citizens are buried in Prospect Hill Cemetery.  One notable interment is that of James “Diamond Jim” Fisk, a New York financier and stockbroker who engaged in questionable business practices.  A former business colleague shot Fisk after an extortion scheme in 1872.  An ornate monument created by sculptor Larkin Mead marks Fisk’s grave.