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The National Cemetery is an
impressive site with many Civil War dead buried there. Also buried here are the
members of Andrew's Raiders who were hung as spies after being caught in the "great
locomotive chase" (image below, near the main gate). Before visiting, watch the
Buster Keaton movie "The General" (the name of the stolen train), which was
recently listed as one of the top 100 movies. It is quite funny while also being
surprisingly accurate in may ways (when his train is stolen by Andrew's Raiders, the
engineer did take off after it on foot). The spot where the train "The
General" was captured outside of Chattanooga has a marker, and the actual General
itself is in the Kennesaw Civil War Museum within a
hundred yards of where it was stolen. Since the Andrews' Raiders were the first
soldiers to receive the new Congressional Medal of Honor, the National Medal of Honor Museum of Military History is
located in Chattanooga (there is also a nice Medal of Honor Museum on the U.S.S. Yorktown
in Charleston, S.C.). On Memorial Day weekend there is a small ceremony and
the combined Boy and Girl Scouts place a small American at each of the over 37,000
individual graves (including 12,000 Union soldiers), making for an impressive sight. The
cemetery holds the remains of veterans from the Revolutionary War to the Gulf War and 186
graves of German prisoners-of-war from both World Wars. It is the only national cemetery
to contain the graves of foreign POW's. After the battles for Chattanooga, General
Thomas needed a place to bury his dead and established a small cemetery near the position
at Orchard Knob. He personally supervised the burial of the Union soldiers who died at
Chattanooga. When asked by a chaplain if he wanted them buried by state as they had done
at Gettysburg he replied, "No, No, mix them all up. I'm sick of state's rights."
There is a separate "Citizen's Cemetery" located on 3rd Street as shown by
the dot in the map below. While the modern Chattanooga city map that I have says
"Citizen's Cemetery", the actual signs on it say "Citizen's and Confederate
Cemetery", and it contains at least a few historical markers for the
Confederacy. You need to contact the Chattanooga Parks and Recreation Service to
unlock the cemetery. Excellent additional info is on the web at sites such as this one. |
