Arlington National Cemetery

Arlington Estate was established by George Washington's step-grandson, George Washington Parke Custis. When he died in 1857, he willed the estate to his daughter, Mary, who was married to U.S. Army 1st Lt. Robert E. Lee. Lee, of course, later joined the Confederacy and the Lees abandoned Arlington Estate at the start of the Civil War. The U.S. Army soon seized the property, as all of the Washington, D.C. federal buildings were within range of the estate.

The Army ordered that Arlington Estate be used as a cemetery, and the first military burial took place on May 13, 1964. Various national cemeteries were established during the Civil War to provide a place to bury the Union war dead, and Arlington officially became a national cemetery on June 15, 1864 by order of Secretary of War Edwin Stanton.

Today, more than 400,000 veterans and their dependents are buried at Arlington National Cemetery. Service members from each of America’s major wars, from the Revolutionary War to today's conflicts, are interred at Arlington.

In addition to its official Website, Arlington National Cemetery once had a Website run by an enthusiast. The latter Website contained much more information about the various features, memorials, and graves in the Cemetery, and I heavily linked to it.

Sadly, sometime in September 2022, the enthusiast Website was replaced with an identically-named Website, which contains only a small amount of information about Arlington but also offers tours of the cemetery, CBD oil, weightloss pills, and other pharmaceuticals of dubious validity. Luckily, archive.org's Wayback machine had captured all of the pages to which I linked, so my site now links to the Wayback machine version of the page.

Aerial view.

We visited Arlington twice, in the summers of 2007 and 2011. It cloudless and hot when we arrived in 2007, but became overcast and drizzly toward the end of our visit. If you visit in the summer, I do recommend bringing in bottled water, as there are few drinking fountains (there are some located near the Memorial Amphitheater; we didn't find out about this until fairly late in our visit).