St. Augustine National Cemetery

St. Augustine, Florida, seceded from the Union in January 1861, and Confederate troops captured Fort Marion, originally built in the late 1600s as Castillo de San Marcos. By early 1862, after the fall of Nashville, Tennessee, Confederate troops in Florida were ordered to Tennessee, leaving the state nearly defenseless. In March 1862, a combined Union Army-and-Navy operation moved on major cities along Florida's Atlantic Coast, and after the U.S.S. Wabash anchored off St. Augustine, Commodore Christopher Rogers led unarmed sailors ashore to accept the surrender of Fort Marion and St. Augustine. Union forces then controlled the city for the rest of the war. The land of St. Augustine National Cemetery had been part of a monastery until 1763, when Britain took Florida from Spain and converted it into Saint Francis Barracks for soldiers. Spain regained Florida in 1783 and continued its military use, and after Spain ceded Florida to the United States in 1821, the U.S. Army occupied the site. A post cemetery was established there in 1828 for those who died while stationed at nearby Fort Marion, and after the Seminole Wars ended in 1842, soldiers killed in those conflicts were reinterred there. By 1875, Union soldiers, including 42 known and 40 unknown dead, were also buried there. The cemetery served only soldiers who died at the fort until 1881, when it became a national cemetery. Quartermaster General Montgomery C. Meigs then ordered the neglected burial ground restored, and by 1893 it was enclosed by a wall. It was expanded in 1912 and 1913, and its current Spanish Colonial Revival superintendent's lodge of coquina stone was completed in 1938, with a matching rostrum built in 1940. Three coquina-block pyramids mark the graves of officers and soldiers killed in action or dead in service during the Second Seminole War between 1835 and 1842, including Major Francis L. Dade and 110 men under his command who were killed on December 28, 1835. On July 25, 1842, Colonel William J. Worth ordered vaults prepared for their reburial and directed that unostentatious monuments be erected. In 1844, an 18-foot marble obelisk was raised near the pyramids, with inscribed panels dedicating the monument and identifying those buried there, and members of the St. Augustine garrison contributed one day's pay toward its cost.

St. Augustine, Florida · United States