A Tax Sale And A Cemetery

Arlington National Cemetery was officially created as a military cemetery June 15th 1864.


Arlington National Cemetery was established on the grounds of Arlington House. Arlington House was an estate owned by Confederate General Robert E Lee’s wife Mary Anna [Custis] Lee, the grand-daughter of Martha Washington. The Custis family bought the land where the cemetery is located in 1802 and began building Arlington House.

The United States government purchased Arlington House and its two hundred acres at a tax sale for $26,800 in 1864. Mrs. Lee sent an agent to pay the $92.07 property taxes that were due, but the government refused to take the payment which was not made in person. The United States Soldiers’ National Cemetery in Washington DC was rapidly filling with military burials, so United States Quartermaster General Montgomery C Meigs wrote of Arlington that the “grounds about the mansion are admirably adapted to such a use." United State Secretary of War Edwin M Stanton officially had the land set aside as a military cemetery June 15th 1864. Burials were begun on the ground of Arlington House before the ink had time to dry.

Custis Lee the son of Robert E Lee sued the United State for ownership of Arlington House in 1874, claiming the estate was held in trust for his mother. The United States Supreme Court ruled in Lee’s favor and Congress returned the land to him. The next year, 1875 Lee sold the property back to the government for $150,000 at a ceremony with Robert Todd Lincoln. President Herbert Hoover held the first official National Memorial Day May 30th 1929 in Arlington National Cemetery.

This is a must read web site for information about the Arlington National Cemetery

Honoring The Dead

The Washington Race Course Cemetery saw the burial of Union dead and the first Memorial Day on May 1st 1865.


Many communities set aside a day to mark the end of the Civil War and honor those who had died. Some of the towns who began these early Memorial or Decoration Days included Columbus Mississippi, Carbondale Illinois, and Sharpsburg Maryland, among others. The first of these remembrance is thought to have been held by former slaves on May 1st 1865 at the Washington Race Course in Charleston South Carolina.

The race course was used during the war as prison camp, and contained a mass grave behind the old grandstand of the Union soldiers who died there. Following the end of the war, the former slaves who lived in the area exhumed the bodies of the 257 Union soldiers who died there and reentered them in individual graves. There was a fence built and the area was declared to be a Union cemetery and named the “Martyrs of the Race Course“. It was reported by Charleston newspapers that on May 1st 1865 a crowd of around 10,000 including some 2,800 children attended ceremonies that included sermons, singing, picnicking on the grounds and laying of flowers. The 54th Massachusetts and the 34th and 104th United States Colored Troops drilled and did a march around the cemetery. This then became the first Decoration Day.