ARLINGTON NATIONAL CEMETERY

American national burial ground in Arlington County, Virginia, U.S., on the Potomac River directly opposite Washington, D.C. It occupies a tract of more than 500 ac (200 ha) and is generally semicircular in shape; its central feature is the mansion built in 1802 on the estate of George Washington Parke Custis, adopted son of George Washington. The mansion is said to have been modelled after the Theseum in Athens. The portico, with its eight white columns, is a landmark visible from across the river. The mansion, now called Arlington House, serves as the Robert E. Lee Memorial. When Lee, who had married Mary Anne Randolph Custis in the mansion in 1831, left Arlington (April 22, 1861) to command the Confederate troops in the Civil War, federal soldiers occupied the estate, converting the mansion into a headquarters and the grounds into a camp. Arlington became a military cemetery in 1864 by order of the secretary of war. After years of litigation George Washington Custis Lee, the residuary legatee, succeeded through the U.S. Supreme Court in declaring the government a trespasser. Eventually, in 1883, he sold the title to the U.S. for $150,000. The first soldier buried there (May 13, 1864) was a Confederate prisoner who died in a local hospital. Some of the dead from every war in which the U.S. has participated, including a few officers of the American Revolution, have since been buried there. Many of the nation's military leaders and other outstanding individuals, including Gen. John J. Pershing, Adm. Richard E. Byrd, William Howard Taft, Robert E. Peary, Gen. Jonathan Wainwright, Gen. George C. Marshall, Robert Todd Lincoln, Maj. Pierre-Charles L'Enfant, William Jennings Bryan, John F. Kennedy, and Robert F. Kennedy, also are buried there. The cemetery is the site of the Tomb of the Unknowns, also called the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, first established as a memorial to the dead of World War I but now considered a memorial to the dead of other wars as well. Nearby is the Memorial Amphitheatre, erected through the efforts of the Grand Army of the Republic as a place of assembly for Memorial Day services and dedicated May 15, 1920. The roofless, white marble structure, enclosing a natural amphitheatre, is copied after both the Theatre of Dionysus at Athens and the Roman theatre at Orange, Fr. The Fields of the Dead (interments now exceed 163,000), with their seemingly endless lines of plain stones, follow a pattern adopted in 1872 for use in all national cemeteries. The U.S. Marine Corps War Memorial (Iwo Jima flag-raising statue) is near the cemetery. Additional reading