General Ambrose Burnside, commander of the U.S. Army Department of the Ohio, established Camp Nelson in June 1863 on a ridge above the Kentucky River about 20 miles south of Lexington. The Union depot provisioned the army's invasion of East Tennessee and later the Western Theater, while supplying mules, horses, and other quartermaster and commissary needs. Nelson General Hospital and a Soldiers' Home administered by the U.S. Sanitary Commission were established there. Camp Nelson also became an important recruiting and training camp for U.S. Colored Troops, and many enslaved men who came to enlist brought their families, prompting the army to build a large refugee camp to shelter them. More than 10,000 U.S. Colored Troops passed through Camp Nelson, making it the third-largest U.S. Colored Troops recruiting center established during the Civil War. Early in 1866, Captain E.B. Whitman began gathering information to prepare for the reinterment of Union soldiers buried across the Military Division of Tennessee, a vast district including Alabama, Georgia, Kentucky, Mississippi, and Tennessee. He sought the locations of Union graves through newspaper notices, received replies from citizens, chaplains, soldiers, and officers, and made three major expeditions across the region, stopping at hundreds of battlefields and engagement sites. His work led to the movement of thousands of Union dead to twelve new national cemeteries. In May 1869, Whitman submitted a detailed summary of the project to the quartermaster general, including sketches, site plans, and data on interments and service affiliations. Before 1869, ten federally established or public cemeteries in Kentucky held Union soldiers, but as reinterment work neared completion the army reduced the number of cemeteries in the state to six. Camp Nelson National Cemetery, the largest, had been established to bury soldiers who died in camp. In 1867, the U.S. Army Quartermaster General's Office moved remains there from Covington, Frankfort, London, Perryville, and Richmond, Kentucky, more than doubling the cemetery to 6.5 acres. Two years later, it contained 3,638 Union graves, including 867 U.S. Colored Troops, and fewer than one-third of the dead were unknown. By 1874, the government had purchased another 3 acres and built a Second Empire-style lodge for the superintendent and his family. The secretary of war appointed the cemetery superintendent by law, and the first superintendent there was Ewald Schneider, who had served in the 5th U.S. Artillery and lost a leg at the Battle of Chickamauga, Georgia, on September 19, 1863.