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On May 13, 1864, the first military burial was conducted for Private William Christman. Brigadier General Montgomery Meigs, Quartermaster General of the U.S. Army, who was responsible for the burial of soldiers, ordered Arlington Estate used for a cemetery. The existing D.C.-area national cemeteries (Soldiers’ Home and Alexandria National ...
In 1802, George Washington Parke Custis, the grandson of George Washington's wife Martha through her first marriage, began building Arlington House at the present-day Arlington National Cemetery on land that he inherited from John Parke Custis, his natural father, following his death.
- United States
- Arlington County, Virginia, U.S.
- May 13, 1864; 159 years ago
- National
Though Meigs’ initial proposal to Stanton and subsequent orders to officers at Arlington clearly spelled out the Quartermaster General’s intentions, the cemetery did not develop quite as he envisioned. At first, most of the burials were made some distance from the mansion.
- Arlington House
- Civil War Burials
- Freedman’s Village
- Tomb of The Unknown Soldier
- Future of Arlington National Cemetery
- Sources
Arlington National Cemetery is built on plantation land that once belonged to George Washington Parke Custis. Custis was the grandson of Martha Washington and the step-grandson of President George Washington. The plantation is located on a hilltop overlooking the Potomac River and Washington, D.C.Custis inherited the 1,100-acre plantation from his ...
Beginning on May 24, 1861, the Union Army used the land and house as a camp and headquarters. As the carnage of the Civil War entered its third year, fatalities began to outpace the burial capacity at Washington, D.C.-area cemeteries. To address the problem, the federal government designated Arlington as a national military cemetery in 1864. Privat...
In June 1863, the U.S. government established a Freedman’s Village for African Americans on a portion of the Arlington estate. The village consisted of enslaved people who were freed by advancing Union forces (referred to as “Contrabands”) or those who had escaped from nearby Virginia and Marylandplantations. At its height, roughly 1,100 former ens...
The Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, or Tomb of the Unknowns, is a monument at Arlington National Cemetery dedicated to unidentified U.S. service members who died in the line of duty. It is considered the most hallowed grave at Arlington National Cemetery. The Tomb of the Unknown Soldier was dedicated on November 11, 1921 during an Armistice Day ceremo...
More than 400,000 people have been buried at Arlington National Cemetery, including two U.S. Presidents—William Howard Taft and John F. Kennedy. Currently, as many as 30 U.S. service members or relatives are buried at Arlington each day. The cemetery, which has gone through several expansions through the years, now spans 624 acres, roughly one squa...
History of Arlington National Cemetery. Arlington National Cemetery. How Arlington National Cemetery Came to Be. Smithsonian Magazine. 8 Things You Didn’t Know About Arlington National Cemetery. PBS NewsHour.
- Arlington National Cemetery is located on Confederate General Robert E. Lee’s confiscated estate. Days after resigning from the U.S. Army on April 20, 1861, to take command of Virginian forces in the Civil War, Robert E. Lee left the Arlington estate where he had married Mary Lee and lived for 30 years.
- A Supreme Court ruling in 1882 could have resulted in the exhumation of 17,000 graves. More than a decade after Lee’s death, the Supreme Court ruled that the U.S. government had seized his estate without due process and ordered it returned to his family in the same condition as when it was illegally confiscated.
- The cemetery hosted the first national Memorial Day commemoration in 1868. In 1868, General John A. Logan, commander-in-chief of the Grand Army of the Republic, officially proclaimed May 30 as Decoration Day “for the purpose of strewing with flowers or otherwise decorating the graves of comrades who died in defense of their country during the late rebellion.”
- Arlington is the only national cemetery to hold servicemembers from every war in U.S. history. Although the first military burial at Arlington National Cemetery didn’t occur until 1864, the burial ground holds the remains of those who fought in every war since the American Revolution.
Robert M. Poole. November 2009. Starting in 1864, Arlington National Cemetery was transformed into a military cemetery. Bruce Dale. One afternoon in May 1861, a young Union Army officer went...
Apr 21, 2024 · The first soldier buried (May 13, 1864) on the Lee plantation was a Confederate prisoner who had died in a local hospital. Sixty-four other soldiers were also buried that day, including some in the estate’s rose garden, and by the end of 1864 more than 7,000 soldiers had been interred.
