Arlington National Cemetery

Union soldiers buried their dead in Robert E. Lee’s garden. Before Arlington was a national cemetery, it was the Lee homestead, and then a tent city for occupying troops.

Robert E. Lee inherited Arlington House from his wife’s late father. It was a hillside manse overlooking 1,100 acres, just across the river from the White House. Lee left Arlington in April 1861, after resigning from the Union Army and accepting the rank of major general of the Confederacy.

Union troops were preparing to claim the estate almost as soon as he left and his wife Mary, fled.

As the war raged, Arlington looked like a place to put a graveyard after the government acquired the estate in 1864, for $26,800. It became a cemetery during June, 1864. Today, Lee’s former estate is the final resting place for more than 420,000 people. Funeral services continue six days a week, with several dozen a day.

Memorial Day

Memorial Day, originally called Decoration Day, is a day of remembrance for those who died in our nation's service. The preferred name for the holiday gradually changed from "Decoration Day" to "Memorial Day", which was first used in 1882.
  
Decoration Day was officially proclaimed on 5 May 1868 to honor Union and Confederate soldiers by General John Logan, national commander of the Grand Army of the Republic (an organization for Northern Civil War veterans), in his General Order No. 11, and was first observed on 30 May 1868, when flowers were placed on the graves of Union and Confederate soldiers at Arlington National Cemetery. The date was chosen because it was not the anniversary of a battle.

The holiday changed after World War 1 from honoring just those who died fighting in the Civil War to honoring Americans who died fighting in any war.

In 1971, Memorial Day was declared a federal national holiday by an act of Congress, and its observance was set on the last Monday in May.