Chattanooga National Cemetery

Chattanooga National Cemetery was established in eighteen sixty-three, created in the immediate aftermath of the bloody Battles of Chickamauga and Chattanooga to give Union soldiers a dignified burial. The Union dead had initially been buried hastily on the battlefields in shallow graves. General George Thomas ordered the cemetery established on a hillside overlooking the city, and the reinterment of over twelve thousand soldiers took place over the following years.

More than four thousand of those buried here are unknown. Confederate soldiers were buried elsewhere, as national cemeteries at the time were reserved for the Union dead. The cemetery remains an active military burial ground today, with veterans from every American conflict since the Civil War interred on these same hillsides above the Tennessee River.