Alexandria National Cemetery

During the Civil War, Alexandria, Louisiana, briefly served as the headquarters of the Confederate Department of the Trans-Mississippi, covering states and territories west of the Mississippi River, until the Confederates moved the base to Shreveport in spring 1863 just before a U.S. Army-Navy operation captured the city on May 7. Union forces abandoned Alexandria by summer, but in spring 1864 the city became a target of Union Gen. Nathaniel Banks' Red River Campaign. In March, a combined land and sea operation captured Fort DeRussy downriver, and Union forces reoccupied Alexandria. Banks then marched west, was defeated by Confederate troops under Gen. Richard Taylor, and retreated to Alexandria on April 9, where low river levels trapped the naval fleet until troops built a dam that raised the water level and allowed the gunboats to escape. The Union Army withdrew from Alexandria on May 13, burning part of the city as it departed. In 1867, the federal government established Alexandria National Cemetery on 8.24 acres seized from a private citizen. By 1874, there were 1,283 interments there, all but twelve of them Union soldiers or sailors, most buried as unknowns. By 1880, the cemetery was enclosed by a brick wall, with a brick Second Empire-style lodge for the superintendent and his family, large artillery pieces at the entrance, and trees lining the road from the main gate to the central flagstaff. In 1931, the old lodge was razed and the current one was built. In July 1906, the all-black 25th U.S. Infantry arrived at Fort Brown near Brownsville, Texas, for duty and faced discrimination and physical abuse in the town. After unknown persons killed a bartender and wounded a police officer on August 13, 1906, the army summarily discharged without honor all 167 enlisted men. As a result, the War Department decided to close the fort and remove the remains from Brownsville National Cemetery, a former post cemetery from the Mexican-American War that had been designated a national cemetery in 1867. In 1909, a contractor using local labor exhumed more than 3,000 dead there and shipped the remains to Alexandria in five freight-train cars. Identified remains were buried along the northwest wall in Section B, while unknown remains were placed in a mass grave on the southeast side of the flagpole circle, where the federal government erected a group monument.

Pineville, Louisiana · United States