Featured Stories

On February 22, 2022, the National Cemetery Administration unveiled a wayside sign at Fort Sam Houston National Cemetery near seventeen graves of Black World War I soldiers from the 3-24th Infantry executed by the Army as mutineers after a violent, racially driven melee in Houston. The events led to an immediate, historic change to the courts-martial appellate-review process on January 17, 1918.

In 1980 Vernice Ferguson was named head of VA’s Nursing Service, the nation’s largest nursing system with 60,000 professionals. She was African American. Only sixty years earlier, the first Black nurses were hired to care for Veteran patients. Ferguson was a teacher, leader, and advocate for racial parity at VA.

President Abraham Lincoln’s famed 272-word Gettysburg Address, cast in iron tablets, was placed in national cemeteries in 1909 as part of a nationwide birthday centennial program. When the popular president, born February 12, was honored again in 2009, NCA began to produce more tablets to ensure the speech is in all new national cemeteries.

Providing goods to Veterans, their families, and visitors has been a staple of VA hospitals since their inception at the end of the Civil War. The Veterans Canteen Service (VCS) we know today evolved out of these early stores and VCS formally celebrates its 75th Anniversary this year.

The present-day Bob Stump VA Medical Center campus in Prescott, Arizona has had a long and interesting history from the time the Arizona Territory was created in 1863. Established as Fort Whipple, the facility transitioned over many years to an eventual VA Medical Center campus.

In November 1946, a brief article appeared in the Birmingham Star Gazette with an accompanying photo. Patients from the Birmingham VA Medical Center in Van Nuys, California beat the team of doctors they were playing in the first game of wheelchair basketball by a score of 16-6.

After a night raid by German forces on Nov. 2, 1917, a group of U.S. soldiers became the first group taken prisoner in WWI. These POWs included Sgt. Edgar Halyburton and Pvt. Clyde Grimsley, and each suffered the privations that occurred in early 20th Century imprisonment.

As another Thanksgiving is upon us, thoughts turn towards the traditions that surround the holiday, many of them involving food. At the National VA History Center Archives, staff members went looking to see what past Thanksgivings looked like and were rewarded with positive results.

On September 1, 1973, the Veterans Administration (VA) became the steward of 103 national cemeteries, 22 soldiers’ and government lots in private cemeteries, 7 Confederate cemeteries, and 3 monument sites with the absorption of the National Cemetery System. It also took responsibility for the procurement of government headstones and markers for eligible veterans. VA was now in the cemetery service.

Katherine Stinson was an early aviation pioneer, becoming the fourth woman to receive a pilot license in the nation. Her flying career took her to the doorsteps of World War I and back.

Soon after World War II concluded, Gen. Omar Bradley, fresh off relinquishng command of the U.S. Army's Twelfth Army Group, was given a critical mission back stateside - take charge of the Veterans Adminsitration and prepare to support the millions of Veterans coming back home.

After the Civil War concluded, the Veteran service organization Grand Army of the Republic commissioned multiple stained glass windows that were early powered light displays. Two survive today at VAs in Leavenworth, Kansas and Milwaukee, Wisconsin.