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Dayton National Cemetery from the air. Courtesy of the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs
On a hilly landscape west of Dayton, Ohio, rows of uniform marble headstones surround a tall soldiers' monument. Beyond them stands an old brick building built to house disabled Union veterans of the Civil War. Together, the Dayton National Cemetery and the former Central Branch of the National Home for Disabled Volunteer Soldiers tell how the nation learned to honor its veterans — in life and in death.
A problem the country had never faced
More than 3.2 million soldiers served in the Civil War — about 2.2 million for the Union and 1 million for the Confederacy. Some 364,000 Union and 133,821 Confederate soldiers died, and when the war ended, the graves of nearly half a million dead had no official recognition. About 2.7 million veterans headed home. How should the country care for them, and for its dead?
The federal government answered with two new systems: regional soldiers' homes and national cemeteries.
The soldiers' homes
In March 1865, President Abraham Lincoln signed a law to care for Union volunteers disabled by wounds, lost limbs, disease or injury. First called the National Asylum for Disabled Volunteer Soldiers, it was renamed the National Home because of the stigma of "asylum."
| First three homes | Togus, Maine; Milwaukee, Wisconsin; and Dayton |
| Eventually | 11 branches nationwide |
| Admission | an honorable discharge and a disability from the war; men entered voluntarily and could ask to leave |
| Daily life | run like the military — uniforms, companies, bugles and cannon marking the schedule — with schools, churches, hospitals and gardens thought to aid healing |
The National Homes for Disabled Volunteer Soldiers. Image from the National Park Service's page
Dayton's Central Branch
Building began in 1867, and by 1868 the Central Branch could care for 1,000 men. It grew to 627 acres, with quarters, a hospital, a library and a chapel — built partly with lumber from nearby Camp Chase, where Confederate prisoners had been held. By 1884 it was the largest such home in operation, caring for 64% of the veterans in federal institutional care, with nearly 5,000 residents by 1888.
- It was the first federal institution to admit Black veterans; more than 200,000 African Americans served in the Union army and navy.
- It believed exercise, reading, music, health care and job training, in beautiful surroundings, would restore veterans for civilian life.
- It had modern steam heat, indoor plumbing and elevators.
Ohio historian Henry Howe wrote in 1888 that the home was "a small city mainly of graybearded men, few women, and no children," famous for its gardens and drawing more than 100,000 visitors a year by excursion train from Ohio and neighboring states.
In 1930, veterans' benefits were combined under the new Veterans Administration, which took over the homes. They also housed veterans of the Spanish-American War and World War I, but by World War II they were phased out as veterans increasingly got medical care and went home. Today the campus holds the Dayton National Cemetery and a VA Medical Center.
The national cemeteries
On July 17, 1862, Lincoln signed the law creating the National Cemetery system. After the war, Army troops combed battlefields for the shallow, unmarked graves of Union dead — Confederate burials were left to local communities until after the turn of the century. By 1870, nearly 300,000 Union soldiers lay in 73 national cemeteries; about 58% of the graves were of known soldiers and 42% were unknown.
Site plan of Dayton National Cemetery; each grave is identified by section and number. Courtesy of the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs
Grave markers took years to settle:
| Stage | Marker |
|---|---|
| 1861 | General Orders No. 75 requires hospital records of the dead and a registered headboard at each grave |
| 1865 | headboards of white pine, painted white and lettered in black |
| 1866 | Secretary of War Edwin Stanton proposes cast-iron monuments — later rejected as ugly and impermanent |
| 1872 | Congress orders a small headstone with the soldier's name and state |
| 1873 | Secretary of War W. W. Belknap chooses the designs: a slightly rounded marble upright with a recessed shield for the known, and a 6-inch marble block bearing only a number for the unknown |
Secretary of War W. W. Belknap's 1873 letter to Quartermaster General Montgomery Meigs selecting the permanent headstones
A second page of the letter
Headstones for the regular Army and the U.S. Colored Troops (USCT) read "USA" or "USCT" instead of a state, and "PVT" was left off since soldiers were assumed to be privates.
Dayton National Cemetery
The first burial, of Corporal Cornelius Solly of the 104th Pennsylvania Infantry, took place on September 11, 1867. In the home's first 20 years, about 3,000 veterans were buried here — including more than 650 men of the USCT, making it one of the nation's largest burial grounds for Black Civil War soldiers.
Civil War gravestones at Dayton. Courtesy of the Dayton VA Archive
The grid layout, perhaps inspired by army camps, is credited to Chaplain (and Captain) William B. Earnshaw, who had also led USCT troops in recovering and reburying 22,000 soldiers for other national cemeteries. Home rules required burial in a clean Home uniform and funerals by military custom, with a chaplain and, weather permitting, the band.
The Dayton Soldiers Memorial. Courtesy of the Dayton VA Archive
A tall marble monument topped by a soldier dominates the grounds. Dayton is also one of a few national cemeteries that still has its original "Bivouac of the Dead" tablets, cast at the Rock Island Arsenal — stanzas of an 1850s poem by Theodore O'Hara, a Mexican War veteran who later fought for the Confederacy:
The muffled drum's sad roll has beat
The soldier's last tattoo;
No more on life's parade shall meet
That brave and fallen few.
The soldier statue. Courtesy of the Dayton VA Archive
The VA took over the cemetery in 1930, and it became a National Cemetery in 1973. Now about 110 acres, it holds veterans of the Revolutionary War, the War of 1812, the Mexican War, the Civil War, the Spanish-American War and every 20th-century conflict, and is run by the VA's National Cemetery Administration.
A present-day grave marker. Courtesy of the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs
Sources
Based on "A Nation Repays Its Debt: The National Soldiers' Home and Cemetery in Dayton, Ohio," a Teaching with Historic Places lesson by Paul LaRue and his history students, edited by the National Cemetery Administration and the TwHP staff, National Park Service, drawing on the National Register nomination for the Central Branch and quoting Henry Howe's Historical Collections of Ohio (1888) and Theodore O'Hara's "Bivouac of the Dead"; a work of the United States government in the public domain; rewritten in hubnx's own words. The lesson dates the soldiers' monument to both 1873 and 1877, gives its height as both 30 and 50 feet, dates Belknap's letter to both June 23 and June 25, 1873, and gives national-cemetery counts that do not add up, so those details are left out here.
Licens: CC0 1.0 (offentligt eje) · Bearbejdet efter www.nps.gov
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