Soldiers' National Cemetery
Gettysburg, PA
The Soldiers' National Cemetery at Gettysburg is operated by the National Park Service as part of the Gettysburg National Military Park.
At the beginning of the Civil War, large national cemeteries that are commonplace today did not exist. Fallen Civil War soldiers were temporarily buried in makeshift graves close to where they fell, and many were then transfered to their home states for permanent burial. The graves were often shallow and were usually identified with only crude markers that might guide family and friends to where their loved ones had fallen.
Pennsylvania, however, took notice of the lack of honorable resting places for the soldiers, and in 1863 Governor Andrew Curtain was instrumental in the creation of the nation’s first national cemetery—the Soldiers’ National Cemetery at Gettysburg. (Although the idea for the Gettysburg’s cemetery was born in 1863 and the Cemetery was dedicated in 1863, it was not formally incorporated as the Soldiers’ National Cemetery until 1864.)
Once the land had been secured (a piece of land adjacent to the town’s existing Evergreen Cemetery on Cemetery Hill), it was necessary to exhume and rebury soldiers who had been hastily buried months before. Confederates were excluded from the plan, and many of the South’s fallen soldiers would remain in and around Gettysburg in their makeshift graves for several years. In 1872, the Ladies Memorial Association oversaw the exhumation of many of the Confederates for reburial in southern cemeteries (like Hollywood Cemetery in Richmond, Va.).
For more information about the Soldiers' National Cemetery at Gettysburg, visit http://www.nps.gov/getc/index.htm.