Mobile National Cemetery

Mobile National Cemetery was established in May 1866 on 3 acres of land in Magnolia Cemetery, donated by the City of Mobile to the federal government. Divided into four sections with a central flagstaff, it contained more than 900 burials, including remains brought from Forts Morgan and Gaines and from cemeteries in Conecuh and Pollard in Conecuh County and Claiborne in Monroe County. In the 1870s, the U.S. Army built a brick wall around the cemetery, and in 1881 a brick Second Empire-style lodge for the superintendent and his family was erected. A decade later, an octagonal brick-and-iron rostrum was constructed for ceremonial events. In 1936, the government expanded the cemetery by purchasing 3 acres on the opposite side of Virginia Street, where the remains of four Confederate soldiers are buried. During the Civil War, after New Orleans fell in April 1862, Mobile became the last significant Confederate port on the Gulf of Mexico. A Union blockade failed to close the port, which was defended by forts Gaines, Morgan, and Powell, by mines called torpedoes stretched across Mobile Bay, by three lines of earthworks on the city’s west side, and by earthworks from Spanish Fort to Blakely on the east. In August 1864, Union Adm. David Farragut’s fleet charged past the forts, and his eighteen ships overwhelmed Confederate vessels until only the ironclad C.S.S. Tennessee remained in action. After the Tennessee surrendered, Farragut bombarded the forts, and Fort Morgan surrendered on August 23, 1864, giving U.S. forces control of Mobile Bay, though the city itself did not surrender until the final days of the war in spring 1865. The 76th Illinois Infantry Monument was dedicated on April 9, 1892, by surviving members of the regiment to honor men who died in the assault on Fort Blakely, and in 1940 the United Daughters of the Confederacy erected an interpretive marker in the section added in 1936 at a remnant of the earthworks that had protected the city during the war.

Mobile, Alabama · United States