George Washington Parke Custis, Washington’s step-grandson, began building Arlington House in 1802 as a memorial to the first president. His daughter Mary married Robert E. Lee, and when Lee joined the Confederacy in 1861, Union troops seized the hill overlooking Washington. Under an 1862 law on direct taxes in insurrectionary districts, the estate was assessed $92.07, and commissioners refused payment from Mary Lee’s cousin Philip Fendall because she had not appeared in person. The government then bought the property at auction. In 1864 Quartermaster General Montgomery Meigs ordered burials placed as close to the mansion as possible, starting with Private William Henry Christman in May.

George Washington Custis Lee sued, and in 1882 the Supreme Court ruled 5 to 4 in his favor; he sold the land back for $150,000 in 1883. On the southern part of the estate, Freedman’s Village, founded in 1863, housed between one and three thousand people with schools, churches and a hospital until evictions and a $75,000 buyout cleared it by 1900. A 2010 Department of Defense Inspector General report found misplaced headstones, discarded cremated remains and paper records that did not match the graves.

• Mary Lee buried the family silver before fleeing.
• Sojourner Truth lived and worked in Freedman’s Village.
• The cemetery conducts about 27 to 30 funerals a day, and in-ground burial is now tightly restricted while the columbarium accepts most honorably discharged veterans.
• The Vietnam Unknown was identified in 1998 as Air Force First Lieutenant Michael J. Blassie, and his crypt has stayed empty.
• Wreaths Across America began in 1992 when Maine wreath maker Morrill Worcester brought 5,000 surplus wreaths to Arlington.