Burial records of Confederate dead frequently refer to someone interred near the Basil Biggs‘ home. Basil is probably the best known black resident of the era; he is celebrated for his role in the Underground Railroad as well as work in helping to create the National Cemetery and the Lincoln Cemetery. Basil would later purchase a farm near the center of Pickett’s Charge and would ultimately be the person who sold the Copse of Trees to the National Military Park.
At the time of the battle, though, Basil was a tenant farmer on property owned by John Crawford. The John S. Crawford farm lay along the Taneytown Road, just south of Gettysburg. Like many properties in that corridor, it was pressed into service during the battle and its aftermath. Crawford owned more 150 acres of productive farmland, and the main house was built of stone—a detail that became important in later recollections, since African American farmer and veterinarian Basil Biggs lived there as a tenant. Biggs, who had been driven from Carroll County, Maryland, in the 1850s for his antislavery activities, relocated to Adams County and eventually rented the Crawford farm before purchasing his own property nearby in 1863. Oral histories and early battlefield guides often pointed to the “stone house on the Crawford farm” as the Biggs residence during the battle years.
The farm’s location placed it squarely in the path of retreat and advance during Pickett’s Charge on July 3. Confederate forces surged across the fields toward the Union center, and many of the wounded and dead were carried or dragged back across the Taneytown Road. In the chaotic aftermath, burial details had to use whatever ground was close and available. The Crawford property, like its neighbors along the road, became one of many makeshift cemeteries. Confederate dead, in particular, were laid in shallow graves on private lands because Union authorities did not assume responsibility for their reburial at the National Cemetery. Thus, the presence of Confederate burials on Crawford’s farm reflected both the farm’s geographic position and the wartime practice of leaving the defeated enemy in situ.
For Biggs, living on the Crawford farm during this period was doubly significant. Not only did he witness the battle from a tenant’s perspective, but after the war he became central to the organized reburial of Union soldiers. Under contract with the federal government, Biggs and his crew exhumed thousands of bodies from scattered farms—including his own rented ground—and reinterred them in the new Soldiers’ National Cemetery. The Crawford farm therefore represents a nexus of battlefield trauma, African American resilience, and postwar memory.
The farm remained in local hands for decades, and though the battlefield landscape has since been altered by road construction and development, traces of the Crawford property and its stone house survive in records and photographs. Its story—linking Basil Biggs, Confederate burials, and the broader struggle over how to remember the dead—captures the layered civilian experience of Gettysburg as clearly as any other site.
The following are the known Confederate burials near the home of the Biggs family. As with other lists, Find-a-Grave links are provided where available. These men were all from the 13th, 17th, 18th, and 21st Mississippi Infantry regiments with the exception of William Pryor Creecy who fought in the Louisiana Washington Battalion.
William Pryor Creecy
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