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As much as such a statement is bound to be shown to be incorrect eventually, since all it takes is one example to make it false, this statement jumped out at me from a recent article in the Tennesseean. Knoxville's Bethel Confederate Cemetery contains the remains of over 1,600 Confederate dead. Thinking that the conflict may be due to actual geographical size, a search led me here. By this consideration, McGavock also falls short - Bethel Cemetery property encompasses 2.4 acres. Neither is Bethel a public cemetery. Founded by the Knoxville Ladies Memorial Association, ownership of the cemetery passed to Miss Mamie Winstead in the mid-1950s. Since her death in 1989, the cemetery has been under the care of the Hazen Historical Museum Foundation.
Curiously, it has never occurred to any of us on the cemetery board that we may actually be the "largest privately held Confederate Cemetery in the United States" - 1,600 graves and 2.4 acres just never felt that big, comparatively. This warrants a little more research. In any case, since the statement as applied to McGavock Cemetery is incorrect, I'm removing it from the lede. Archarin (talk) 01:59, 18 March 2015 (UTC)[reply]
I've discovered that the major problem with this superlative is deciding what qualifies in the first place as "privately held." I can't see a distinction between Battle of Franklin Trust (or whatever the particular managing non-profit is) qualifying as "privately held" and Hazen Historical Museum Foundation qualifying as "privately held." But what else qualifies under the same standard? In some amount of digging, I've found, for example, Stonewall Confederate Cemetery in Winchester, Virginia, which contains the remains of 2,575 Confederate soldiers, and which is owned and managed by the Board of Managers of the Mount Hebron Cemetery (adjoining it), chartered in 1844. It's larger by any standard of measure. Any such claim by McGavock Cemetery would have to be based on some other interpretive definition, or arbitrary narrowing of the criteria. Archarin (talk) 03:25, 20 March 2015 (UTC)[reply]
