| Gettysburg National Cemetery | |
| Mapframe: | yes |
| Closed: | --> |
| Location: | Gettysburg National Military Park, Gettysburg, Pennsylvania |
| Country: | United States |
| Coordinates: | 39.8172°N -77.2319°W |
| Type: | National Cemetery |
| Owner: | National Park Service |
| Size: | 17acres[1] |
| Findagraveid: | 1584934 |
Gettysburg National Cemetery is a United States national cemetery in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, created for Union casualties from the Battle of Gettysburg in the American Civil War. The Battle of Gettysburg, which was fought between July 1 to 3, 1863, resulted in the largest number of casualties of any Civil War battle but also was considered the war's turning point, leading ultimately to the Union victory.
The land of the cemetery was part of the Gettysburg Battlefield, and the cemetery is within Gettysburg National Military Park, which is administered by the National Park Service of the U.S. Department of Interior.[2]
Originally called Soldiers' National Cemetery, U.S. 16th President Abraham Lincoln delivered his Gettysburg Address at the cemetery's consecration on November 19, 1863. That day is observed annually at the cemetery and in the town as "Remembrance Day" with a parade, procession, and memorial ceremonies by thousands of Civil War reenactor troops representing both Union and Confederate armies and descendant heritage organizations led by the Sons of Union Veterans of the Civil War (SUVCW) and the Sons of Confederate Veterans (SCV).
The cemetery contains 3,512 interments from the Civil War, including the graves of 979 unknowns. It also has sections for veterans of the Spanish–American War (1898), World War I (1917–1918), and other wars, along with graves of the veterans' spouses and children. The total number of interments exceeds 6,000.
Battlefield monuments, memorials, and markers are scattered throughout the cemetery, and its stone walls, iron fences and gates, burial and section markers, and brick sidewalk are listed as contributing structures within Gettysburg Battlefield Historic District.
The centerpiece of Gettysburg National Cemetery is Soldiers' National Monument (1869), a 60-foot-tall (18 m) granite monument designed by sculptor Randolph Rogers and architect George Keller. It is surrounded by concentric semicircles of graves, divided into 18 sections for Union states (1 each),[3] a section for United States Regulars, and 3 sections for unknown soldiers.[3]
Battlefield monuments within Gettysburg National Cemetery include those of the 1st United States Artillery Battery H, the 2nd Maine Battery, the 1st Massachusetts Battery (Cook's Battery), the 1st Minnesota Infantry, the 1st New Hampshire Light Battery, the 5th New York Independent Light Artillery, the 136th New York Volunteer Infantry, the 1st Ohio Battery H, the 55th Ohio Infantry, the 73rd Ohio Infantry, and the 75th Pennsylvania Infantry; and markers for the 1st Ohio Battery I and the 3rd Volunteer Brigade Artillery Reserve (Huntington's Brigade). Other monuments include the New York State Monument (1893), the Kentucky State Monument (1975), the Lincoln Address Monument (1912), the Friend to Friend Masonic Memorial (1994), the Major-General John F. Reynolds Statue (1872), and the Major-General Charles Collis Memorial (1906).
In 1863, William Saunders was selected by a committee of Union governors to design the Soldiers National Cemetery. Saunders' radial plan of "simple grandeur," grouped the Union dead by states and focused on a central monument. The graves were marked with simple, unadorned, rectangular slabs of gray granite inscribed with the name, rank, company, and regiment of each soldier. Saunders noted in his description of the design that this repetition of "objects in themselves simple and common place" was meant to evoke a sense of "solemnity" which "is an attribute of the sublime." Officers and enlisted men were buried alongside one another to symbolize the egalitarian nature of the Union Army, which consisted mostly of volunteer citizen soldiers.[4]
Union remains were transferred from the Gettysburg Battlefield burial plots, local church cemeteries, field hospital burial sites, including Camp Letterman, Rock Creek-White Run Union Hospital Complex, USA General Hospital,[5] and the "Valley of Death" below Little Round Top, where unburied soldiers decomposed in place.[6] Samuel Weaver, as "Superintendent of the exhuming of the bodies", personally observed the contractor's workers opening graves, placing remains in coffins, and burying them in the cemetery, and at least one reinterment from neighboring Evergreen Cemetery.
See main article: Consecration of the National Cemetery at Gettysburg.
| 1863-07-01 | Union artillery in the summit's cornfield[7] at the subsequent cemetery site counterfired on Confederates west of Gettysburg at the seminary and railway cut.[8] On July 2, Confederate sharpshooters in Gettysburg were "picking off" Federals on the hill.[9] | ||||||
| 8,900 dead soldiers were on the battlefield,[10] and townspeople and farmers buried some of them at battlefield sites (e.g., along fences and stone walls). | |||||||
| 1863-07-07 | The local Provost Marshal solicited "Men, Horses, and Wagons…to bury the dead" in various Gettysburg Battlefield plots.[11] | ||||||
| 1863-07-10 | The last "Rebel dead" were interred on the battlefield (horse carcasses remained to be buried).[12] | ||||||
| Battlefield land preservation began by August 5 with attorney David McConaughy's purchases including "the heights of Cemetery Hill"[13] which he planned for a soldiers' cemetery where lots could be purchased for reinterring soldiers. | |||||||
| 1863-07-20 | who was deployed from Gettysburg in a combat unit, began weekly newspaper ads for "removals into Ever Green Cemetery".[14] | ||||||
| 1863-07-24 | David Wills, a Gettysburg attorney, recommended a state-funded cemetery at the south slope of East Cemetery Hill "on the Baltimore turnpike, opposite the Cemetery"—the open, sloped tract of 8acres[15] was sold by Peter Thorn in 1899.[16] | ||||||
| 1863-07-28 | State funds regarding "Pennsylvanians killed [were for] furnishing transportation for the body and one attendant" to home cemeteries[17] (600–700 coffins were used.)[18] | ||||||
| 1863-08-14 | Wills, after being designated Pennsylvania Governor Andrew Curtin's agent, purchased McConaughy's summit tract and a day or so later a 2nd tract "between Evergreen and the five-acre tract of Miller's apple orchard" totalling 17acres for $2,475.87[19] ($ in dollars). | ||||||
| 1863-08-21 | Wills had contacted William Saunders about designing the cemetery. | - | 1863-10 | William Saunders had been selected as the cemetery's landscape architect.[20] --> | - | 1863 | The reinterment contract was issued and required wooden boards nailed to the head of the coffins to protrude from the ground for displaying identities.[21] |
| 1863-10-17 | † In a former cornfield of the battle, the first reinterments (Cpl Story & Pvt James) were from the 1804 "United Presbyterian Burying Ground". The "Associate Reformed Graveyard" closed in 1899[22] (at least five others are identified as reinterred from that graveyard.) | ||||||
| 1863-11-16 | ۩ A flagpole[23] was erected "near the stand prepared for the world-renowned Orator, Hon. Edward Everett".[24] The 12x[25] "platform" was "on the spot where the monument is to be built…"fronting away from the cemetery [toward the subsequent] vast audience" (in Evergreen Cemetery). | ||||||
| 1863-11 | Joseph Becker sketched the flagpole, the "grand stand"[26] ("speaker will face this way"), and East Cemetery Hill graves. | ||||||
| 1863-11-19 | ¶ President Abraham Lincoln delivered the Gettysburg Address after the Everett oration at the Consecration of the National Cemetery at Gettysburg. | ||||||
| 1863-11-24 | † 1188 remains, including 582 unknown, "had already been interred in the Cemetery".[27] | ||||||
| 1863-12-07 | Wills advertised for farmers to report graves on their property.[28] | ||||||
| 1863-12-17 | The Board of Commissioners of the Soldiers' National Cemetery at Gettysburg was organized at Harrisburg and incorporated on March 25, 1864.[29] [30] | ||||||
| 1864-02-03 | Michigan appropriated the first payment from a state for the cemetery. By the federal turnover in 1872, 18 states had contributed $129,523.24. | ||||||
| The "city of Boston" exhumed 158 soldiers' remains for reinterment in Massachusetts. | |||||||
| 1864-03-19 | † Samuel Weaver reported 3,512 total Union bodies "taken up and removed to the Soldiers' National Cemetery" October 27-March 18. | ||||||
| 1864-03-21 | † Wills identified the cemetery had 3,564 total burials, including those buried directly in the cemetery (not exhumed) (e.g., Major George Tate's leg amputated at a hospital was buried in the cemetery which he annually visit from Massachusetts.)[31] | ||||||
| 1864-12 | † 37 more bodies had been located and reinterred, the stone walls had been completed (the lodge nearly so), and the "main avenue" was "ready for macadamizing". | ||||||
| 1865 | Wills had iron fencing erected between the Soldiers' and Evergreen cemeteries contrary to the condition when Pennsylvania purchased McConaughy's tract. |
