Yorktown National Cemetery

In the spring of 1862, war again scarred Yorktown's landscape as a Union army prepared to besiege Confederate forces holding the town. On the night of May 3-4, 1862, in the face of Union siege artillery, Confederate forces withdrew from the area. Yorktown then became a Union garrison for most of the Civil War and provided hospital service to wounded and sick soldiers. By war's end, the remains of approximately 600 Union soldiers had been buried in this area between the 1781 Allied Siege Lines. In 1866, the cemetery was designated a national cemetery, and Union dead from over 50 field burial sites within 50 miles of Yorktown were re-interred here. Of the 2,183 burials, two-thirds of the remains are unknown, and only 747 are identified. Among those buried here is Isaac Cornelius, who enlisted with his brother James in Company C, 100th Pennsylvania Volunteer Infantry, on August 31, 1861, submitted his resignation in early May 1864 but remained with the army while it was processed, was mortally wounded at the Battle of Cold Harbor on June 2, 1864, and died four days later, leaving a bride of just three months widowed; the Civil War also claimed the lives of three of his brothers. Also buried here is William Scott of the 3rd Vermont Regiment, known as the Sleeping Sentinel, who in August 1861 was caught asleep at his post while on picket duty near Washington, D.C., was court-martialed and sentenced to death as the first soldier from the Army of the Potomac to face execution, was spared by President Abraham Lincoln, and was later one of 44 Vermont soldiers killed when Vermont troops assaulted Confederates at Dam No. 1 south of Williamsburg on April 16, 1862.

Virginia · United States