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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History of VA in 100 Objects
Object 86: The Roll of Honor
“The following pages are devoted to the memory of those heroes who have given up their lives upon the altar of their country, in defense of the American Union.”
So opened the preface to the first volume of the Roll of Honor, a compendium of over 300,000 Federal soldiers who died during the Civil War and were interred in national and other cemeteries. The genesis of this 27-volume collection published between 1865 and 1871 can be traced to Quartermaster General Montgomery C. Meigs and the department he oversaw for a remarkable 21 years from 1861 to 1882.
History of VA in 100 Objects
Object 85: Congressman Claypool’s “$1 Per Day Pension” Ribbon
Founded in 1866 as fraternal organization for Union Veterans, the Grand Army of the Republic (GAR) embraced a new mission in the 1880s: political activism. The GAR formed a pension committee in 1881 for the express purpose of lobbying Congress for more generous pension benefits.
An artifact from the political wrangling over pensions is now part of the permanent collection of the National VA History Center in Dayton, Ohio. The item is a small pension ribbon displaying the message: “I endorse the $1 per day pension as recommended by the Departments of Ohio and Indiana G.A.R.” The button attached to the ribbon features two American flags and the phrase “saved by the boys of ’61-65.” The back of the ribbon bears the signature of Horatio C. Claypool, a Democratic judge who ran for the seat in Ohio’s eleventh Congressional district in the 1910 mid-term elections.
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Object 84: Gettysburg Address Tablet
President Abraham Lincoln is one of the most revered figures in American history. Rankings of U.S. presidents routinely place him at or near the top of the list. Lincoln is also held in high esteem at VA. His stirring call during his second inaugural address in 1865 to “care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan” embodies the nation’s promise to all who wear the uniform, a promise VA and its predecessor administrations have kept ever since the Civil War.
Ever since Lincoln first uttered those memorable words in November 1863, the Gettysburg Address has been linked to our national cemeteries. In 1908, Congress approved a plan to produce a standard Gettysburg Address tablet to be installed in all national cemeteries in time for the centennial of President Lincoln’s birth on February 12, 1909.
