Beaufort National Cemetery: One of the Oldest in the Country

On the edge of downtown Beaufort, set back from the street behind a white fence, is one of the oldest national military cemeteries in the United States. Beaufort National Cemetery was established in March of eighteen sixty three, in the middle of the Civil War, when the need for a permanent burial ground had become urgent after two years of fighting in the surrounding Sea Islands. Because Beaufort was under Union control from November of eighteen sixty one onward, it became the burial place for soldiers who died in the Sea Islands theater from both the earliest and the later stages of the war.

Among those buried here are members of the United States Colored Troops, the Black regiments who fought throughout the Beaufort area, and white Union soldiers who died of wounds and disease in the hospitals the occupying army had established in the town's churches and public buildings. The cemetery contains more than twenty-eight thousand burials. The graves are arranged in the orderly rows common to national cemeteries, with white markers stretching across the grass in lines that suggest a discipline that extended even to death.

A circle of cedar trees at the center was planted during the cemetery's early years. A significant portion of the burials were reinterred here from other locations in the Sea Islands after the war, as the army consolidated its dead into a single recognized site. Some of those reinterred had been buried in temporary graves near the beaches and marshes where they fell.

The cemetery gave them a permanent place in the landscape of the town that outlasted the conflict. It remains an active national cemetery today.