Lincoln Cemetery: Gettysburg's Forgotten Veterans

Just outside Gettysburg's famous National Cemetery lies a smaller burial ground that tells a story the official landscape often omits. Lincoln Cemetery was established in the years after the Civil War by the Sons of Good Will to provide a proper burial place for Gettysburg's African American citizens and Black Civil War veterans. A number of soldiers from the United States Colored Troops are interred here, men who were denied a place in the National Cemetery because of segregation.

Also buried here are veterans of the Spanish-American War and both World Wars, along with civilians who built the community through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. First known as Good Will Cemetery, it was later renamed Lincoln Cemetery, honoring the president whose address just down the road consecrated the ground of a war these men had also fought.