The monument is sited on the 300 block of Pennsylvania Avenue NW in front of the E. Barrett Prettyman United States Courthouse.

Prominent attendees at the dedication ceremony in 1927 included President Calvin Coolidge, Governor John Stuchell Fisher, Secretary of the Treasury Andrew W. Mellon, and Senator Simeon D. Fess.

The memorial is one of eighteen Civil War monuments in Washington, D.C., which were collectively listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1978.

He graduated from the United States Military Academy at West Point in 1835 and briefly served in the Army during the Second Seminole War.

From the 1850s until the onset of the Civil War in 1861, Meade was involved in coastal surveying and designing lighthouses, mainly for the Corps of Topographical Engineers.

[3] Unlike many Civil War generals, there were no calls for a memorial to Meade after his death in 1872 because he was not popular with Lincoln, Grant, or his fellow officers, though he was considered a hero in his native Pennsylvania.

The commission, led by John W. Frazier, a veteran who fought with Meade at Gettysburg, was composed of architects, artists, and planners who agreed on very little.

[4] Grafly was a founder of the National Sculpture Society and longtime educator at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts who was best known for his portrait busts.

Although Grafly was at the peak of his career, the CGA was hesitant in approving him to design the sculpture because his symbolic works had been criticized for being incomprehensible.

[5] Several years of bickering about the final design and location of the memorial passed until March 28, 1922, when an official groundbreaking ceremony took place.

[4][5] The chosen site was near 3rd Street NW in Union Square, a public park on Capitol Hill, and close to the large Ulysses S. Grant Memorial.

White, temporary pavilions adorned with greenery, national shields, and the coat of arms of Pennsylvania were built around the memorial for invited guests and members of the public.

[6] Northminster Presbyterian Church minister Hugh K. Fulton gave the invocation and Reverend J. H. Pershing led the dedicatory prayer.

As the memorial was unveiled, a flock of pigeons, symbolizing peace, was released from an altar bearing the Army of the Potomac's emblem.

The GCWRT also contacted Maryland Representative Marjorie Holt who had requested the memorial be placed in her congressional district at Fort George G.

[5] Sculptor Henry Kirke Bush-Brown was chosen to design an earlier monument to Meade that stands on the Gettysburg Battlefield, located close to the point where Pickett's Charge was repulsed.

It stands in front of the E. Barrett Prettyman United States Courthouse and across the street from the National Gallery of Art's East Building.