Cave Hill National Cemetery

When the Civil War began, Louisville was the largest city in Kentucky and the twelfth largest in the nation. Because its commercial and industrial economy was not dependent on slave labor, less than 10 percent of the city's population was enslaved. As a major transportation hub, Louisville was connected by rail to other Kentucky cities, Cincinnati, and Nashville, and the Ohio River provided another route. More than 100,000 Union soldiers passed through the city by railroad or river, and by 1862 Louisville was vital to the Union war effort. The Louisville & Nashville Railroad carried supplies from northern states to Union troops in Tennessee and beyond. After the October 1862 Battle of Perryville, several hundred Confederate prisoners were confined in the city, and wounded Union soldiers were treated in Louisville's nineteen military hospitals. Many soldiers who died of wounds or sickness were buried here. Early in 1866, Capt. E. B. Whitman began gathering information for the re-interment of Union soldiers buried across the Military Division of Tennessee, which included Alabama, Georgia, Kentucky, Mississippi, and Tennessee. He placed newspaper notices seeking locations of Union graves, received replies from citizens, chaplains, soldiers, and officers, and made three major expeditions across the region, stopping at hundreds of battlefields and engagement sites. Because of his work, thousands of Union dead were moved to twelve new national cemeteries. In May 1869, Whitman submitted a detailed summary of the project to the quartermaster general, including sketches and site plans of each cemetery and data on interments and service affiliations. Before 1869, ten federally established or public cemeteries in Kentucky contained the remains of Union soldiers, but as re-interment neared completion the army reduced the number of cemeteries in the state to six. The private Cave Hill Cemetery, established in 1848, donated a half acre to the government for Union burials in 1861, and federal acquisitions between 1863 and 1868 increased the lot to 2.9 acres. By 1869, the national cemetery contained 3,910 interments, of which only 563 were unknown. The remains came from several Kentucky places, including Henderson, Owensboro, and battlefields and sites along the Louisville & Nashville Railroad between here and Woodsonville in Hart County. In 1867, one of the nation's oldest Civil War monuments, honoring soldiers of the 32nd Indiana Infantry, was moved here, and on July 25, 1914, the Union Soldiers and Sailors Monument Association dedicated a memorial to the unknown dead buried in the national cemetery.

Louisville, Kentucky · United States