Yorktown National Historic Cemetery (Virginia)
August 7th, 2008 by leafworksYorktown National Cemetery * Yorktown National Historical Site * Yorktown, Virginia. I Passed the Union Soldier’s Burial Ground … laid out in avenues and enclosed with a Virginia rail fence .. each grave having a headboard neatly marked telling the hero’s name, his company, and regiment … In this lonely resting place, on the plains of Yorktown, sleeps many a noble boy, far from his home and kindred, with no kind friend to drop a tear, or sing a funeral requiem. ~ Bartholemew S. DeForest, 1862.
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 the 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. Only 747 are identified.
