List of memorials and monuments at Arlington National Cemetery
It takes an act of Congress to place a stone or bronze memorial monument that is not a headstone at Arlington National Cemetery.
and his daughter Eleanor (Nelly) Parke Custis (later Lewis) grew up at Mount Vernon, the home of Martha and George Washington.
Mary Anna Custis married her distant cousin, United States Army Lieutenant Robert E. Lee in June 1831.
When Mary Custis Lee did not pay her property taxes in person, the estate was legally confiscated.
[5] On July 16, 1862, the United States Congress passed legislation authorizing the purchase of land for national cemeteries for military dead.
[7] While Private William Henry Christmas became the first Union soldier buried at Arlington on May 13, 1864,[3] formal authorization for burials did not occur until June 15, 1864.
These first memorials were small, as the federal government (burdened by the cost of the war) expended little money on the cemetery.
United States Army Quartermaster General Montgomery C. Meigs ordered the construction of the monument in 1865.
[11] The bodies of 2,111 Union and Confederate dead were collected and placed in a vault beneath the monument, which was sealed in September 1866.
In 1971, however, the cemetery expanded eastward to its present boundary atJ efferson Davis Highway.
[26] In 1884, a Temple of Fame was erected in the center of the flower garden on the south side of Arlington House.
The Temple was a round, Greek Revival, temple-like structure with Doric columns supporting a central dome.
Inscribed on the pediment supporting the dome were the last names of great Americans such as George Washington, Ulysses S. Grant, Abraham Lincoln, and David Farragut.
[29] A Confederate States Army monument is scheduled to be removed by December 22, 2023 because it reportedly represents "sanitized depictions of slavery" and promotes the Lost Cause of the Confederacy myth.
As codified in Title 32 of the Code of Federal Regulations, Part 553, a concurrent or joint resolution of Congress is needed before any new memorial or monument may be placed at Arlington.
[31] This requirement does not apply to group burials, for which an aboveground marker may be erected without congressional approval.
On August 6, 2012, Congress enacted the "Honoring America's Veterans and Caring for Camp Lejeune Families Act of 2012" (P.L.
Title VI, Section 604 of this legislation permits the Secretary of the Army to establish regulations for the erection at Arlington National Cemetery of memorials or monuments to an individual or military event if 25 years have passed.
All alternative locations to Arlington National Cemetery must be ruled out, and the United States Commission of Fine Arts must be consulted on the memorial's appropriateness.
[33] In 2012, legislation began moving through Congress to approve a "Place of Remembrance" at Arlington National Cemetery.
Tanner, a Union Army veteran, lost both legs during the American Civil War.
He became a stenographer and clerk with the War Department, and took down most of the eyewitness testimony during the early hours of the investigation into the assassination of Abraham Lincoln.
