Forest Hill Soldiers' Lot

An estimated 700,000 Union and Confederate soldiers died in the Civil War from 1861 to 1865, and as the death toll rose, the U.S. government struggled to bury fallen Union troops, helping lead to a national cemetery system. On September 11, 1861, the War Department ordered officers to keep accurate and permanent records of deceased soldiers, and federal authority to create military burial grounds came in an Omnibus Act of July 17, 1862. Cemetery sites were chosen where troops were concentrated, including camps, hospitals, battlefields, and railroad hubs. By 1872, 74 national cemeteries and several soldiers' lots contained 305,492 remains, about 45 percent of them unknown. Soldiers' lots were established in private cemeteries in northern states, while national cemeteries were built throughout the South where most Civil War action occurred. Forest Hill Cemetery in Madison was established on land the city bought in 1857, and Section 34 of the 140-acre cemetery was set aside for Union dead in 1862 under the name Soldiers' Rest. Its 240 interments include troops who died while training at Camp Randall and others who died at Harvey U.S. General Hospital. In spring 1862, Wisconsin Governor Louis P. Harvey traveled south to visit the state's volunteer soldiers in hospitals near the fighting, but on April 19 he fell into the river and drowned while crossing between boats at Savannah, Tennessee. Afterward, his widow Cordelia became the state sanitary agent, toured southern hospitals, saw the severe conditions soldiers endured, and in 1863 persuaded President Abraham Lincoln to establish a general hospital in Madison. Harvey U.S. General Hospital opened in a three-story octagonal house built for former Governor Leonard Farwell, with a branch hospital at nearby Camp Randall, and in December 1864 the complex reported 587 patients. After the war, the general hospital became the Wisconsin Soldiers' Orphans' Home. The city deeded the 0.36-acre soldiers' lot to the federal government in 1866, and the government acquired a second, smaller parcel in Forest Hill Cemetery in 1908. The lot also contains two Civil War memorials: the Wisconsin Soldiers' Orphans' Home Monument, a marble obelisk erected in 1873 and inscribed with the names of eight orphans who died at the home, with their graves beside it, and a large boulder erected in 1891 by Woman's Relief Corps No. 37 inscribed To the Unknown Dead.

Madison, Wisconsin · United States