Construction of the Danville Branch of the National Home for Disabled Volunteer Soldiers began in early 1898, and its first resident, Charles Butler, arrived on October 13. The 325-acre campus included barracks, a mess hall, Protestant and Catholic chapels, a hospital, a farm, and shops for printing, painting, machinery, tinwork, and harness making, all staffed by veterans, as well as a library, opera house, amusement hall, and bandstand. The government treated these National Homes as a reward for military service rather than charity. In 1930, the National Homes merged with the U.S. Veterans Bureau and Bureau of Pensions to form the Veterans Administration, and the facility continues to serve veterans as the VA Illiana Health Care System. The first cemetery was northwest of this site, and Martin Branch, formerly of the 60th U.S. Colored Infantry, who died in January 1899, was the first interment. Two years later, the government acquired 30 acres east of the main complex and opened the existing cemetery, designed with graves in concentric circles radiating from the center, and reinterred the remains of ninety-nine veterans from the old Danville burial ground. The cemetery became a national cemetery in 1973 and was listed in the National Register of Historic Places in 1992. One Civil War Medal of Honor recipient buried here is First Lt. Morton A. Read of the 8th New York Cavalry, who captured the 1st Texas Infantry flag at the Battle of Appomattox Station, Virginia, on April 8, 1865. At the cemetery's center stands a 20-foot-tall Soldiers' Monument with a bronze soldier created by Maine sculptor W. Noble Clark, whose design was also used for the 100th Pennsylvania Veteran Volunteers Monument at Antietam Battlefield in September 1904; the Danville monument was dedicated on Memorial Day 1917.
