In spring 1888, Congressman George Steele, Sr., of Marion, Indiana, introduced legislation authorizing the establishment of a National Home for Disabled Volunteer Soldiers in Grant County. Construction began in 1889, and six barracks and a hospital were completed the next year; between 1895 and 1898, a headquarters building, six more barracks, a dining hall, kitchen, chapel, and Stinson Memorial Hall were added. When the National Home opened in 1890, fifty-six Civil War veterans sought admittance, 500 arrived the next year, and more than 1,700 residents lived there a decade later. As the number of Civil War and Spanish-American War veterans declined through the first two decades of the twentieth century, incoming World War I veterans required a different type of care, and the facility became a psychiatric hospital. In 1930, the National Homes were merged with the U.S. Veterans Bureau and the Bureau of Pensions to form the Veterans Administration, now the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs. A cemetery was established on unused land on the east side of the Marion campus, where Henry Smith, formerly a private in Company E, 20th Indiana Infantry, who died May 29, 1890, became the first interment. The earliest graves were laid out in concentric circles, while sections developed in the 1920s north of the original cemetery followed a traditional grid, and the property was designated a national cemetery in 1973. Two Civil War Medal of Honor recipients are buried there: Seaman Nicholas Irwin of U.S.S. Brooklyn, honored for his skill and courage at Mobile Bay on August 5, 1864, and Lt. Jeremiah Kuder of the 74th Indiana Infantry, honored for capturing a Confederate battle flag at the Battle of Jonesboro, Georgia, on September 1, 1864. At the original cemetery entrance stands the Soldiers Monument, a 10-foot-tall bronze statue of three Civil War soldiers on a granite pedestal designed by Lorado Taft, a copy of a larger work erected in 1894 on the Chickamauga battlefield in Georgia and unveiled at Marion in 1914 to honor all Union soldiers.