The Civil War in northern Arkansas began with the first battle in Arkansas at Big Sugar Creek on February 16, 1862, just south of the Missouri border. The next day, Union Gen. Samuel Curtis' Army of the Southwest continued south, and the invasion culminated three weeks later in the Battle of Pea Ridge, where Curtis defeated Gen. Earl Van Dorn's Confederate forces and drove them east across the Mississippi River. Another Confederate defeat at Prairie Grove in early December left northern Arkansas firmly in Union control, and after that victory federal troops occupied Fayetteville. Confederate troops attacked the city in April 1863 and briefly held the town during the fighting, but they were eventually forced to retreat. Except for a few months in the summer of 1863, Union forces occupied Fayetteville throughout the war. The U.S. Army established Fayetteville National Cemetery in 1867, and remains were brought there from the battlefields of Pea Ridge, Prairie Grove, Cane Hill, and Fayetteville. The Quartermaster Department laid out the roughly square cemetery in a compass-rose design, with a circular grass walkway around the burial sections, six interior walks leading to a central flagpole, separate sections for soldiers from several states and for Indian soldiers, diamond-shaped areas near the center for monuments, and triangular interior sections for officers. By law, the secretary of war appointed a meritorious and trustworthy superintendent who had to be an army enlisted man disabled in service; Josiah Nutting, formerly a private in the 19th Maine Infantry, was named superintendent in September 1867. In the 1870s the federal government improved the cemetery by replacing temporary wooden headboards with permanent marble headstones, enclosing the grounds with a brick wall, erecting a Second Empire-style lodge for the superintendent and his family, and planting flowers and shrubs in areas intended for monuments. A brick-and-iron rostrum for ceremonial events was completed in 1894. As the cemetery expanded over the years to provide more burial space, the original compass-rose design disappeared as walkways filled with graves, the lodge and rostrum were razed, and only a fragment of the boundary wall survives.