Barrancas National Cemetery

In 1825, President John Quincy Adams ordered the creation of a naval station at Pensacola in Florida Territory, and the Pensacola Navy Yard opened the following year. The first U.S. Naval Hospital was built there to treat malaria, yellow fever, and other tropical diseases common to the Gulf Coast, and a cemetery was established soon afterward. In 1839, the War Department improved naval defenses by building Fort Barrancas near the small hospital cemetery. As Southern states moved toward secession, the small federal garrison at Pensacola abandoned the mainland forts and fled to Fort Pickens on Santa Rosa Island. In February 1861, Confederate troops under Gen. Braxton Bragg occupied the abandoned U.S. forts, including Fort Barrancas and the Pensacola Navy Yard. An uneasy truce lasted until April 12, 1861, when Confederate troops fired on Fort Sumter in South Carolina and the Civil War began. Confederate forces attacked Fort Pickens on October 9, 1861, capturing an outlying Union camp but not the fort, and Union batteries shelled the ships ferrying Confederate soldiers back to Pensacola. In early 1862, Confederate forces retreated to Mobile, Alabama, and the U.S. Navy held Pensacola for the rest of the war. In 1868, the Quartermaster Department advised expanding the hospital cemetery to create Barrancas National Cemetery, and troops who died in Florida during the Civil War were reinterred in the 7-acre cemetery, with soldiers on the west side and sailors on the east. Remains from coastal Escambia, Jackson, and Washington counties were later buried there, and seventy-two Confederate soldiers who died during the South's brief occupation of Pensacola are also interred there. The cemetery superintendent lived at Fort Barrancas until the U.S. Army built a lodge on the grounds in 1868, and an 8-foot-tall brick wall was erected around the cemetery the next year. The cemetery continued to change in the twentieth century: a replacement lodge was built in 1904 and razed in 1996, and in 1950 the U.S. Navy transferred more than 20 acres to the army to expand the cemetery, including Warrington Cemetery, a burial ground the navy had created in 1935 by consolidating several civilian cemeteries scattered through the navy yard. No burials have occurred in the civilian cemetery since.

Pensacola Station, Florida · United States