An estimated 700,000 Union and Confederate soldiers died in the Civil War between April 1861 and April 1865, and as the death toll rose, the U.S. government created a national cemetery system to meet the urgent need to bury fallen Union troops. On September 11, 1861, the War Department ordered commanding officers to keep accurate and permanent records of deceased soldiers and required the U.S. Army Quartermaster General to mark each grave with a headboard; a few months later it required burial in graves marked with numbered headboards and recorded in a register. Authority to create military burial grounds came with an Omnibus Act of July 17, 1862, directing the president to purchase land for national cemeteries for soldiers who died in service, and fourteen national cemeteries were established by 1862. After the war, in October 1865, Quartermaster General Montgomery C. Meigs directed officers to survey Civil War lands to locate Union dead and plan their reinterment in new national cemeteries, with sites chosen near camps, hospitals, battlefields, and railroad hubs. By 1872, seventy-four national cemeteries and several soldiers’ lots contained 305,492 remains, about 45 percent of them unknown. In the Act to Establish and to Protect National Cemeteries of February 22, 1867, Congress funded permanent walls or fences, grave markers, and lodges for cemetery superintendents. At first only soldiers and sailors who died during the Civil War were buried in national cemeteries, but in 1873 eligibility expanded to all honorably discharged Union veterans, and Congress appropriated $1 million to mark graves. Upright marble headstones honored those whose names were known, while six-inch-square blocks marked unknowns. By 1873, military post cemeteries on the Western frontier had joined the system, and the National Cemeteries Act of 1973 transferred eighty-two Army cemeteries, including twelve of the original fourteen, to what is now the National Cemetery Administration. The nation also memorialized the war’s human toll, which claimed 2 percent of the U.S. population, through monuments in national cemeteries, Decoration Day observances that began in 1868, and memorial building that peaked in the 1890s; by 1920, more than 120 monuments stood in the national cemeteries.