“At last Curtis could sense that he was closing in on the lost Confederates.

It would be a two-mile trek through the seldom traveled woods outside Front Royal, Virginia, and it could easily result in a futile search for something no more than myth. As a known regional photographer, Curtis had been tipped by locals to a setting that, he said, “brought to mind the truly amazing.” Hopeful, eager—and wary, too, of the disappointment he would experience if he could not find the fabled place—Curtis set out into the cold and gray countryside one day last winter in search of a lost cemetery for Confederate soldiers.