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NATIONAL CEMETERY
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This site was selected in 1866 as a good cemetery location in the general
vicinity of various Civil War battlefields and scenes of action related particularly to
the Peninsular Campaign of 1862 when General George B. McClellan was moving toward
Richmond, the Confederate capital. The cemetery lay close to, and south of, the Confederate
line about Yorktown and in the immediate area of the battleground of 1781 where American
and French troops won the climactic struggle in the American Revolution.
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There are 1,596 marked graves in the cemetery. Of the total of 2,183 burials,
747 are of known persons and 1,436 unknown. Those buried here were for the most part Union
Army soldiers, although 10 Confederate soldiers and three wives are also identified. In an
inspection made in 1868, it was reported that: |
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The interments number 2,180 of which number 11 officers, 716 white soldiers,
4 sailors, 6 colored soldiers, and 8 citizens are known and 2 officers, 1,422 white soldiers,
5 colored soldiers, and 6 citizens are unknown. Besides the burials at the cemetery, bodies
were removed from Williamsburg in James City County, and altogether from twenty-seven
different places in the surrounding country, within a distance of fifty miles. |
Burial List Index
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