Battleground National Cemetery

After the rebels were turned back as the Battle of Fort Stevens ended in 1864, scores of Union soldiers lay dead, and forty-one of them were buried in this tiny plot dedicated to their sacrifice. President Abraham Lincoln, who observed the battle, spoke at the dedication. At barely one acre, Battleground National Cemetery is one of the nation's smallest. Memorial Day once drew hundreds to this hallowed place; the holiday was established by veterans in 1868 to honor the Civil War dead. John I. White later recalled early 1900s Memorial Day ceremonies here that attracted veterans from both sides, including his grandfather, Lewis Cass White, a veteran of the Battle of Fort Stevens. A military band played, crowds listened to patriotic speeches and poems, students from the Brightwood School placed flowers and American flags on the graves, and artillerymen fired a salute. White wrote that after the ceremonies, surviving comrades of the Grand Army of the Republic who had traded shots with the Confederates before Fort Stevens gathered for a light lunch on his grandfather's porch and fought the battle all over again. Memorials to units that fought in the battle stand at the cemetery entrance, where two six-pound smoothbore guns stand guard, and the small rough-hewn sandstone house there was built for the cemetery superintendent and family to a design by General Montgomery Meigs, engineer architect of the Pension Building, now the National Building Museum, and a veteran of the Battle of Fort Stevens.

Washington, District of Columbia · United States