After Confederate forces fired on Fort Sumter in South Carolina on April 12, 1861, and President Abraham Lincoln called for volunteers three days later, men in Quincy, Illinois, rushed into federal service. Because Quincy stood on the Mississippi River and was served by railroads, it became an excellent staging area for soldiers headed south, and the U.S. Army built permanent barracks in Franklin Square at the heart of the city. As the war intensified, Quincy opened hospitals for wounded troops, first in July 1861 in a former chair factory, then in a three-story brick factory, and finally on the Quincy College campus after the U.S. Army converted it into hospital space. Many sick and wounded soldiers died in these facilities, and in 1861 the U.S. Army began burying its dead in a soldiers' lot within Woodland Cemetery, which had been established in 1847 by Quincy founder and former Illinois Gov. John Wood. By the end of the war, the 12,000-square-foot lot held 242 graves, including six unknowns. In 1870 the lot was officially donated to the federal government, enclosed on three sides by stone curbing, and marked at the south entrance by four gun monuments. In 1882 the local chapter of the Grand Army of the Republic successfully lobbied to have the property designated a national cemetery, but after the first superintendent appointed there was charged with fraud, the secretary of war canceled the position and the government instead paid the Woodland Cemetery Association to care for the gravesites. Because Woodland Cemetery stood on a ridge above the Mississippi River, erosion became a serious problem, and the U.S. Army decided it was better to move the dead than build a retaining wall. In fall 1899 the federal government bought a lot in Graceland Cemetery east of downtown from the Quincy Cemetery Association, and the remains of 287 soldiers were reinterred there in a new 0.45-acre soldiers' lot that was no longer classified as a national cemetery. The federal government contracted with the association to maintain the property, a part-time caretaker was appointed by 1924, and in 1936 the site was redesignated Quincy National Cemetery. Modern development, including the extension of Maine Street through the private cemetery in the 1970s, has since separated the two burial grounds.

Photo: Jason Voigt

Quincy, Illinois · USA