Mound City National Cemetery

Visiting a national cemetery can be a humbling experience, especially around holidays such as Memorial Day. You stand there looking at thousands of white marble headstones realizing what lies before you are the bodies of people who were prepared to make the ultimate sacrifice for their country, and many did make the sacrifice.

The Mound City (Illinois) National Cemetery is the closest national cemetery to visit. Approximately 9,000 veterans are interred there. The cemetery is managed by Jefferson Barracks National Cemetery in St. Louis. It's located just over the Alexander/Pulaski County line in Illinois, about a mile northwest of Mound City. It has several notable monuments. In 1874, a marble monument was erected honoring 2,637 unknown Illinois state soldiers and sailors who lost their lives defending their country, as well as a monument dedicated to Confederate soldiers interred there. A notable brigadier general of the Union Army, Russian-born John Basil Turchin (1821-1901), who immigrated to the United States in 1856, is buried there. The cemetery was placed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1997.

During the Civil War, Mound City was the site of a large Union hospital complex created by combining a foundry and hotel to handle 1,500 wounded soldiers. In April 1862, the USS Mound City captured the Confederate steamer Red Rover and converted it to a floating naval hospital. The rising number of deaths at the hospital made it necessary to find a place to bury the dead. The first burials took place in 1862 and in 1864, when a plot of land consisting of 10.5 acres near the hospital was designated by the federal government as a national cemetery, making Mound City National Cemetery one of the oldest national cemeteries in the country. In 2007, the cemetery received an additional 3.6 acres of land.

The cemetery's original internments of 1,644 soldiers died at the hospital and had wooden headstones. Later, marble headstones replaced the wooden ones. White marble headstones evolved into a standard 42-inch long, 13-inch wide and 4-inch thick headstone with a slightly curved top for those who served in the U.S. military. The 47 Confederates interred there have slightly pointed or gabled headstones. U.S. Colored Troops have headstones with the initials "U.S.C.T." Today the cemetery lists approximately 9,000 veterans, including 2,759 unknowns.

If you visit a national Ccemetery, you can place a penny, nickel, dime or quarter on a headstone to send a message of respect to the family. A penny shows you visited. A nickel means you trained in boot camp with the deceased. A dime says you served together in some capacity, and a quarter means you were with the soldier when he died.

The day was overcast when I visited Mound City National Cemetery, which I thought set the mood for taking a photograph without casting a shadow. It seems wrong to me that the living should cast such a long shadow over the graves of those who are prepared or do make the ultimate sacrifice for our freedom.