In early spring of 1866, with the war just a year over, former Confederate Colonel Robert White hosted a meeting at his Romney residence. With him were his brother Christian Streit White, his future sister-in-law Elizabeth Jane Schultze, and his sister Frances Ann White - who would later marry the future West Virginia senator Samuel Lightfoot Flournoy. They decided to honor the Confederate dead of Hampshire County. The new Confederate Memorial Association elected officers, adopted a constitution, and arranged for the decoration of Confederate graves at Indian Mound Cemetery that summer. Then they began raising money for a permanent monument. By 1867 they had a contract with the Gaddes Brothers firm of Baltimore. The pieces arrived at the cemetery on September 14. The monument was dedicated on September 26, 1867.

The memorial is a white marble obelisk twelve feet tall, four square feet at its base, set on a stepped pedestal capped by a sculpted cloth-draped urn. It rises from a raised earthen mound just inside the cemetery's entrance. The inscription chosen by the association reads: The Daughters of Old Hampshire Erect This Tribute of Affection to Her Heroic Sons Who Fell in Defence of Southern Rights. Carved into the base are 125 names: four captains, seven lieutenants (one a chaplain), three sergeants, and 119 privates. Construction cost $1,133.63 - a substantial sum in 1867 dollars for a county still recovering from invasion, occupation, and battle. The fundraising had included entertainment shows and door-to-door solicitation in a community where most residents had little money to spare.

Romney has long claimed two firsts: the first public decoration of Confederate graves (June 1, 1866) and the first Confederate memorial dedicated to fallen soldiers (September 26, 1867). Both claims are contested. Cheraw, South Carolina, dedicated a monument on July 26, 1867 - two months before Romney - but the Cheraw memorial omits any mention of Confederacy, Confederate, or Southern in its inscriptions. The decoration date is also disputed by other Southern communities, though most surviving evidence points to Romney's June 1 ceremony as among the earliest organized public observances of what would later become Memorial Day across the former Confederacy. The precedent that started with a handful of marchers in Romney spread through the South over the next decade and reshaped how the Confederate war dead would be publicly remembered for more than a century.

The memorial was restored in 1984, when weathering had darkened its surfaces. Workers sanded and resealed the marble, and the restoration's $2,850 cost was raised by donation - the donors' names recorded in the same treasurer's book that had recorded the original 1866 contributions. The monument is decorated each year with a handmade evergreen garland and wreath on Hampshire County Confederate Memorial Day. In September 2017, amid a national reassessment of Confederate monuments after the violence in Charlottesville the previous month, the memorial was vandalized with black spray paint. Confederate flags placed nearby were removed, and papers with vulgar language were left behind. The damaged sections were covered with cardboard and tape and later repaired. The monument's story - dedicated in 1867 over the objections of Union authorities, restored in the 1980s, vandalized in 2017 - traces 160 years of American argument about who is remembered, how, and at what cost.