Keokuk National Cemetery: Lincoln's First Burial Ground
Near Nauvoo, Illinois
Across the river from Missouri, in the river city of Keokuk, Iowa, lies one of the original twelve national cemeteries that Abraham Lincoln established during the Civil War. Keokuk National Cemetery opened in eighteen sixty-two, a full year before Arlington National Cemetery, making it one of the oldest federally managed burial grounds in the United States.
Keokuk's role in the war was shaped entirely by geography. Sitting at the confluence of the Des Moines and Mississippi rivers, it was the southernmost major Iowa city and the natural rail and river gateway between the upper Midwest and the battlefields of the South. Seven Union regiments mustered at Keokuk. Camp Ellsworth opened in May of eighteen sixty-one, followed by Camps Rankin, Halleck, and Lincoln.
When the Battle of Shiloh ended in April of eighteen sixty-two with staggering casualties on both sides, the first badly wounded Union men arrived at Keokuk by steamboat just days afterward. The army converted every available building into a hospital. The College of Physicians and Surgeons became a ward. The Estes House hotel became a general hospital. Rice's Hardware Store received patients. At its peak, the city of roughly seven thousand people was operating five separate military hospitals simultaneously.
Soldiers who died in those hospitals needed a permanent place to rest. A plot was carved from the existing Oakland Cemetery and formally designated a national cemetery. Just after the war, six hundred known Union soldiers and twenty-seven unknown soldiers lay buried there. Eight Confederate prisoners of war who died in Keokuk were also interred on the grounds.
The cemetery was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in nineteen ninety-seven. It remains an active Veterans Affairs cemetery today, still receiving the remains of Iowa veterans more than a century and a half after Lincoln signed the order that created it. The Civil War dead of Keokuk were among the first Americans ever to receive a permanent federal burial in their own nation's name.
