Word: arlington
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Strange Wind. Shortly after the war, according to a popular story, some Washington women asked permission to put flowers and wreaths on the graves in Arlington. They had heard that such a custom had grown up among women in the South during the war. The War Department granted permission, the story goes, and designated May 30 as the decoration day, but attached a stern order: no flowers were to be placed on the graves of Arlington's 300 Confederate troops, who were buried in a segregated area. The ladies brought their floral offerings to the cemetery and obediently left...
...Urgent Problem. During the Civil War, the estate was occupied by Union troops; after the Battle of Bull Run, McDowell's forces retreated to Arlington, where Abraham Lincoln visited the troops. As the war progressed, Washington was turned into an armed camp, its hospitals filled with wounded and dying soldiers. The available cemeteries filled up rapidly, and burial became an urgent problem that weighed heavily upon Major General Montgomery C. Meigs, the Army's Quartermaster General, who was responsible for the military dead. One day, while he was walking in Washington, Meigs encountered Lincoln. The President noted that...
...crossed the Potomac to Arlington. Meigs was impressed by the beauty of the estate and the mansion, but his burial problems and bitterness against Lee suddenly overwhelmed him. Turning to Lincoln, he said: "Lee shall never return to Arlington." A few minutes later, as the two men strolled around the grounds of the estate, they came upon a detail of soldiers carrying the bodies of several of their comrades. Meigs halted the soldiers and asked them where they were going. They were going to the burial ground at Soldiers' Home in Washington. Meigs then turned to an Army captain...
...Today, Arlington is maintained by a crew of 90 ground keepers, who carefully tend the grounds, repair crumbling headstones and monuments, and dig graves with huge mechanical diggers that can scoop out a regulation 5-by-3-by-8-ft. hole in eight minutes. One man has the sole duty of patrolling the cemetery endlessly to remove withered wreaths and fading flowers from the markers. From neighboring Fort Myer, 60-odd husky, white-gloved soldiers act as pallbearers, buglers, riflemen (to fire a farewell volley into the air at every military burial) and 24-hour-a-day sentries...
...simple tomb at Arlington, of white Colorado marble, encloses the body of an un identified American soldier who fell in France during World War I. The body was selected from four unknown soldiers in the city hall at Chalons-sur-Marne by Army Sergeant Edward F. Younger, a twice-wounded veteran, who marched past the four caskets, dropped a spray of roses onto the second. "I passed the first one ... the second. Then something made me stop," said Sergeant Younger (who is him self now buried at Arlington). "And a voice seemed to say, 'This...