Beaufort National Cemetery was established in 1863 on 22 acres laid out by the U.S. Army Quartermaster General's Office in sections radiating from a central plaza to form a half circle. Of the 9,226 interments there in 1874, about half were known, and many of the unknown dead were Union prisoners of war originally buried at Camp Lawton in Georgia. Construction in the 1870s added a Second Empire-style superintendent's lodge and a brick enclosing wall, and the existing Dutch Colonial Revival-style lodge was built in 1934; despite later growth, the cemetery retains many of its original design features. Two Civil War monuments stand there: the Union Soldiers Monument, a 20-foot granite obelisk erected in 1870 through the efforts of Mrs. Eliza McGuffin Potter, and a marble tablet on a raised brick base listing the names of 175 soldiers she attended as a nurse in Beaufort hospitals. Soon after the Civil War began in April 1861, Confederate troops fortified Beaufort, with Fort Walker on Hilton Head Island and Fort Beauregard on St. Phillips Island guarding the approach to Port Royal Bay. On November 7, 1861, a Union fleet of seventeen gunboats bombarded the forts, and by late afternoon the Confederates had abandoned both islands, giving the Union Navy control of one of the best harbors on the Atlantic coast. Beaufort was then transformed into a naval station, hospital center, and Union Army headquarters. Beginning in March 1863, the federal government recruited black men for the Union Army, and after the War Department created the Bureau of United States Colored Troops, U.S. Colored Troops regiments fought from Virginia to Texas. More than 1,700 U.S. Colored Troops soldiers are buried there, and in 1989 the remains of nineteen soldiers identified by archaeologists as members of the all-black 55th Massachusetts Infantry Regiment, discovered on Folly Island near Charleston in the late 1980s, were reinterred with full military honors between Section 56 and the back wall of the cemetery.