Maintaining a welcoming environment for the visiting public and mourners was, and remains, a key mission of national cemeteries. Within the first decades of their establishment, the superintendent’s lodge was important to this experience. Government regulations ordered the placement of signs near cemetery entrances telling visitors they were “invited to enter the office in the superintendent’s lodge, where a register is kept, and where information concerning this cemetery will be cheerfully furnished.”
Lodges functioned as dual-purpose offices and residences for the superintendent (usually a disabled veteran) and his family. He was required to keep the building “neat and in good order” and “in a condition to receive visitors at all times.” A reception area was maintained in the office exclusively to accommodate visitors and to be occupied by the superintendent only for housekeeping purposes. A table with a leather-bound visitor register was a required feature of this area.
On July 13, 1895, renowned suffragist and social activist Susan B. Anthony visited Fort Scott National Cemetery, Kansas, along with her brother Jacob Merritt Anthony and his wife Mary, where they signed the ledger. Fittingly, the Anthony’s would have been hosted by Major George W. Ford, one of the national cemetery system’s only African American superintendents. Ford was a wounded veteran of the Indian Wars, civil rights advocate, and descendent of enslaved persons from George Washington’s home at Mount Vernon, Virginia. Ms. Anthony’s cemetery visit came during a stop at her brother’s Fort Scott home on her return east from a suffrage meeting in San Francisco, California.
Visitor registers provide a glimpse into the activity at national cemeteries and the individuals who passed through their gates. Unfortunately, few were preserved because Army regulations allowed them to be destroyed after they were filled, and by 1947 less-visited cemeteries were not required to use them.
By Richard Hulver, Ph.D.
Historian, National Cemetery Administration
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