Existing comment:
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. |