This fifteen-acre cemetery was laid out on a cone-shaped hill east of Martinsburg in 1854. David Hunter Strother, who wrote and drew under the pen name Porte Crayon and who became a general in the Union army, is said to have suggested the layout. He sketched the plan of a Parisian cemetery he had admired, and, with assistance from surveyor J. P. Kearfoot, platted a series of concentric circles. Strother lies buried under a granite marker facing south at the second concentric ring from the top. A massive stone mausoleum, built in 1917–1918, now occupies the crown.