National Cemetery - 1893

Map of National Cemetery, 1893; National Archives.

In 1893, the Quartermaster General's Office of the U.S. Army surveyed the National Cemetery at Fayetteville and produced this map, now held in the National Archives. The cemetery was approved in 1867 and established on a small knoll that had been known as Gallows Hill.

The cemetery was intended as a final resting place for the many soldiers who had fought and died on behalf of the Union Army during the Civil War. In subsequent years, the remains of veterans and their spouses, representing conflicts from the Revolutionary War to the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, have been interred at National Cemetery.

The flagpole at the center of the cemetery was put at the top of the knoll, and the design of the cemetery, which resembles a “compass rose,” spreads downhill away from the center. Graves were arranged in concentric circles and grass pathways led outward along six axis. Since then, the cemetery filled in most of these pathways with more and more graves, obliterating the original design, and the cemetery has been expanded to nearly double its original size.

The U.S. Army Quartermaster General’s Office constructed a seven-foot tall brick wall in 1874 around the cemetery, replacing an earlier wooden picket fence.The wall was about 465 feet long on the north and south sides of the cemetery and about 565 feet long on the east and west.

The brick wall came as the result of recommendations made by landscape architect Frederick Law Olmstead in 1870 to Quartermaster General Montgomery C. Meigs regarding the appearance of all the national cemeteries. Olmsted recommended that the cemeteries be “studiously simple. ... The main object should be to establish permanent dignity and tranquility … a sacred grove — sacredness being expressed in the enclosing wall and in the perfect tranquility of the trees within.”

The original brick wall was replaced in 1926 with a shorter brick wall. In 1999, a metal fence strung between brick columns replaced most of this brick wall. Part of the wall remains on either side of the cemetery’s 1890 southern entrance. The cemetery’s northern gate dates to 1940.

The north entrance to National Cemetery about 1920.

The superintendent’s lodge pictured on the map near the north entrance was the second on the site. Initially, a wood-frame cottage was built just outside the main gate. It was demolished in 1870 and a more substantial brick lodge was built in the Second Empire style. A raised sandstone foundation was topped by a brick exterior and a mansard roof with slate shingles. This lodge was razed in 1991. In 1997, the Veterans Affairs added an administrative building, a service building, and a brick committal shelter, where services are still conducted for burials.