Fort Scott, founded in 1842 and named for Gen. Winfield Scott, was abandoned by the army in 1853 but reoccupied in 1862, when it became headquarters of the Department of Kansas, an important supply depot, and a refuge for pro-Union supporters in Kansas, including white, black, and American Indian people. The 1st Kansas Colored Infantry, the first black regiment recruited in a Northern state, mustered into service here on January 13, 1863, and the 2nd Kansas Colored Infantry was organized here in fall 1863 before leaving for Arkansas. In late October 1862, a group of 224 Union soldiers, seven officers, and several scouts left Fort Scott for Missouri in search of Confederates; at Island Mound they fought for two days, and men who later served in the 1st Kansas Colored Infantry were among them. From 1842 to 1853, seventeen individuals were buried in the post cemetery, and after the fort was reoccupied in 1862 the U.S. Army established Fort Scott National Cemetery as a new burial ground for Union soldiers. An 1867 law required the cemetery superintendent to be a disabled former enlisted man, though those restrictions were later loosened, and Absalom Hyde, a former captain in the 16th Kansas Cavalry, became superintendent in July 1868. In the 1870s the army improved the five-acre cemetery with a stone wall and a brick Second Empire-style lodge for the superintendent's family; the grounds then held 492 interments, including fourteen Confederate prisoners. Among those buried or memorialized there are Capt. Eugene F. Ware of the 7th Iowa Cavalry, who later became a lawyer and author known as "Ironquill" and died in 1911, sixteen American Indian soldiers who enlisted in the Union Indian Home Guard, and a granite monument erected in 1984 honoring soldiers of the 1st Kansas Colored Infantry and the 2nd Kansas Battery, with the names of eighteen men killed near Sherwood, Missouri, on May 18, 1863.