VA -- Arlington Natl Cemetery -- Not Covered Elsewhere:
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ARL_970223_01.JPG: Arlington Cemetery; gravestones
Arlington National Cemetery was established in 1864 after Quartermaster Montgomery Meigs proposed that 200 acres of the land seized from the Robert E Lee family be turned into a cemetery to inter the increasing waves of Civil War dead. By the end of the war, 16,000 graves were on the site.
Additional wars filled the cemetery more. By 1997, there were 245,000 servicemen and their family members buried on the 612 acres.
Most of the dead are of course relatively unknown by most people. And the endless fields of their government-issued grave markers is what makes Arlington and other national cemeteries so powerful. Servicepeople can pay for their own stones if they want but these are placed in less obtrusive places so most of the acreage has a peaceful uniformity.
Having said that, Arlington has the remains of quite a few famous people including: - From the Civil War: - Abner Doubleday - Philip Kearney - Montgomery Meigs (and his son John) - William Rosecrans - Philip Sheridan - Daniel Sickles - From World War I: - John Pershing - From World War II: - Henry (Hap) Arnold - Omar Bradley - Clair Chennault - Jimmy Doolittle - William Halsey - Ira Hayes - William Leahy - George Marshall - Anthony McAuliffe (who replied "Nuts!" to the Germans in the Battle of the Bulge) - Audie Murphy - Matthew Ridgeway - Jonathan Wainwright - From other wars: - Hyman Rickover - Maxwell Taylor - From the space program: - Roger Chaffee - Virgil Grissom - James Irwin - Francis Scobee - Michael Smith - Explorers: - Matthew Henson - Robert Peary - Political figures: - William Jennings Bryan - John Foster Dulles (Secretary of State) - Oliver Wendell Holmes (Supreme Court Justice) - John Kennedy (President) - Robert Kennedy (Attorney General) - Robert Todd Lincoln (Abraham Lincoln's son) - Thurgood Marshall (Supreme Court Justice) - John Mitchell (Attorney General) - Potter Stewart (Supreme Court Justice) - William Howard Taft (President) - Earl Warren (Supreme Court Chief Justice) - Other notables: - Grace Hopper - Pierre L'Enfant - Joe Louis (boxer) - Lee Marvin (actor) - Francis Gary Powers (U-2 pilot) - Walter Reed - Frank Reynolds (newscaster)
ARL_970223_02.JPG: Arlington Cemetery; graves
More graves.
ARL_970223_03.JPG: Arlington Cemetery; graves
And more graves.
ARL_970223_04.JPG: Arlington Cemetery; Arlington House
The Arlington House was Robert E Lee's house before the Civil War. Lee courted and married Mary Anna Randolph Custis and lived here 1831-61. The property itself had been inherited by Mrs Lee from her father, George Washington Parke Custis, grandson of Martha Washington.
When Virginia seceded from the Union in 1861, Lee resigned his commission with the US Army and signed up to head the Virginia army of the south. Union troops occupied the lands because it strategically dominated Washington DC. The estate was confiscated by the north in 1864 for nonpayment of taxes. The Arlington Cemetery was established there and Union soldiers were buried on the land.
After the war, Lee's oldest son sued for the return of the property. In 1882, the US Supreme Court ruled in his favor but there were already thousands of graves on the estate. Lee sold everything to the US government for $150,000.
The cemetery contains the remains of William Howard Taft, Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr, Gen John Pershing, Rear Adm Richard Perry, William Jennings Bryan, Rear Adm Richard Byrd, John Foster Dulles, Gen George C Marshall, Justice Earl Warren, John F Kennedy, Robert F Kennedy, Omar Bradley, and Joe Louis.
ARL_970223_05.JPG: Arlington Cemetery; Cemetery statue
These pictures are from Section 1 in Arlington. Bodies started being buried in Arlington during the Civil War and most were simple servicemen with simple gravestones. But initially, those with money could afford to put up any sort of memorial they wanted to. (You're still allowed to pay for your own more ornate stone--the government pays for the simple marble one--but the ornate ones have to be placed in areas that already have ornate ones and there are some rules.) Section 1 is where most of the early unusual ones went. These are located behind the Arlington House.
Buried in this section are mostly Civil War veterans. They include Abner Doubleday (mistakenly identified as the creator of baseball but in reality he served at Fort Sumter, Second Bull Run, South Mountain, Antietam, Fredericksburg, and Gettysburg [where he took over John Reynolds' men after Reynolds was killed]), Montgomery Meigs (Quartermaster for the Union army during the Civil War, who was largely responsible for creating Arlington Cemetery in the first place), his son John Meigs (who had been killed by Confederate cavalry in a chance encounter), and Jonathan Wainwright.
ARL_970223_06.JPG: Arlington Cemetery; JFK gravesite
Here's a picture of the JFK gravesite at Arlington. Kennedy was buried here shortly after his assassination in Texas. His widow, Jackie, is buried next to him.
ARL_970713_01.JPG: Arlington Cemetery; JFK and Washington DC
A view of the eternal flame of the JFK gravesite in front. In the background, you can see the Potomac River and beyond that the Washington Monument, the Commerce Building, and the Old Post Office Building.
ARL_971102_01.JPG: Arlington Cemetery; Arlington House
Another view of Arlington House.
ARL_971102_02.JPG: Arlington Cemetery; memorial
Another view of that one grave. Notice the figure is on the bow of a boat hull.
ARL_971102_03.JPG: Arlington Cemetery; Nurses' Memorial
This is the main statue from the Army and Navy Nurses Memorial.
ARL_971102_04.JPG: Arlington Cemetery; Joe Louis grave
Joe Louis was heavyweight boxing champ from 1937 to 1949. He served in World War II, doing exhibition bouts before Allied troops. He died in 1981 and was buried here, just down the hill from the Tomb of the Unknowns.
ARL_971201_001.JPG: Arlington Cemetery; Christmas wreaths
Here's a section of Arlington Cemetery near Christmas 1997. All of the graves have been marked with wreaths.
ARL_971201_002.JPG: Arlington Cemetery; Wallace Fitz Randolph
This is an unusual monument at Arlington as it came in before standards for memorials were imposed. Randolph was an artilleryman during the Civil War and wanted a cannon as his memorial (there's a nametag on the memorial itself).
ARL_971201_003.JPG: Arlington Cemetery; Stanton
This memorial isn't to anyone that I'd know (Edwin Stanton is buried in another cemetery) but I liked the wreath.
ARL_971201_004.JPG: Arlington Cemetery; Montgomery Meigs
The casket-like structure is the tomb of Montgomery Meigs, quartermaster of the United States during the Civil War (the man who made sure that supplies and such made it to all the troops), who later went on to design the pension building that became the National Building Museum. During the Civil War, he had been the person who converted Robert E Lee's estate into a Union graveyard. The gravesite also includes his wife as well as his son John who was killed by Confederate soldiers near Harrisonburg Virginia in October, 1864.
ARL_971201_005.JPG: Arlington Cemetery; Abner Doubleday
Here's the memorial to Abner Doubleday, a Union general who's mistakenly called the creator of baseball. He was present during the shelling of Fort Sumter and was said to have fired the first shot in defense of the post.
ARL_971201_006.JPG: Arlington Cemetery; Philip Kearny
Kearny was a Union general who rose to stardom during the Peninsula Campaign. He was killed in the battle of Chantilly Virginia in September 1862 after Second Bull Run when he accidentally rode into enemy lines.
ARL_971201_007.JPG: Arlington Cemetery; Glenn Miller
Here's the marker for Alton Glenn Miller, the big band leader, who was lost at sea near Britain in 1944 where he was serving entertaining Allied troops. This is in a special memorial section of Arlington for people whose bodies couldn't be found.
ARL_971201_008.JPG: Arlington Cemetery; Frank Reynolds
Frank Reynolds, the newscaster, is buried at Arlington Cemetery.
ARL_971201_009.JPG: Arlington Cemetery; Stuart Roosa
Stuart Roosa was the Apollo 14 command module pilot.
ARL_971201_010.JPG: Arlington Cemetery; Michael John Smith
Michael Smith was aboard the space shuttle Challenger when it blew up along with the six other astronauts on board. Francis "Dick" Scobee is also buried here as are the unidentifiable remains of the others.
ARL_971201_011.JPG: Arlington Cemetery; James Doolittle
James Doolittle led the Doolittle Raid on Japan during World War II.
ARL_971201_012.JPG: Arlington Cemetery; Confederate section; statue
Here's Moses Ezekiel's main statue. The woman is holding a plow stock in her hand, symbolically referring to the Biblical passage from the book of Isaiah, "They shall beat their swords into plow shares."
ARL_971201_013.JPG: Arlington Cemetery; Confederate section; statue
Here's detail of the statue.
ARL_971201_014.JPG: Arlington Cemetery; Confederate section; statue
Here's some more detail. The southern troops are looking upward. The sprawling woman seems to be protecting a shield saying "Constitution", as if still asserting the southern right to secede.
ARL_971201_015.JPG: Arlington Cemetery; John Pershing
John Pershing was in charge of the Allied armies during World War I.
ARL_971201_016.JPG: Arlington Cemetery; Robert Peary
Here's the memorial to Robert Peary, who discovered the North Pole in 1909.
AAA "Gem": AAA considers this location to be a "must see" point of interest. To see pictures of other areas that AAA considers to be Gems, click here.
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I still have them though. If you want me to email them to you, please send an email to guthrie.bruce@gmail.com
and I can email them to you, or, depending on the number of images, just repost the page again will the full-sized images.
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1997 photos: Since 1984, I've lived in Silver Spring, Maryland.
From 1981 to 2002, photos were taken using a Pentax ME Super camera.
From 1989 to 2002, I was doing all pictures as prints (instead of slides which I had grown up on).
In 1997, at the age of 40, my photo obsession began and I started taking thousands of photos per year.
In September, 2002, I switched to digital cameras and the number of photos exploded.
Image quality is going to be variable because these are scans of slides and/or prints.
The images shown here were scanned in two phases. In the early years of the website, I rescanned a selection of pre-digital images, all at fairly low quality settings. During the COVID pandemic, I launched the Great Rescanning Effort, rescanning ALL of my pre-digital images from various media (prints, slides, negatives, etc) at higher resolution and quality settings. Mutilple versions of images -- some from the initial scannning phase, some from prints, some from slides/negatives -- were posted so there are frequently duplicate images on the same page. At some point, I hope to have time to do a final review and get rid of the duplicates but that'll have to wait until all of the pre-digital images are finally posted.
Trips this year: North Carolina (Dad), Florida (Mom), using a time share in Arkansas to visit Civil War sites in Missouri, Georgia, Arkansas, Mississippi and Tennessee. The Civil War became my excuse to see places I'd never been to in my life and it was a great motivator for 20 years or so.
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