Qualla: Spanish–American War Memorial (Arlington National Cemetery)

Spanish–American War Memorial (Arlington National Cemetery): Introduction

Mon, 01 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Two thousand nine hundred and ten American military personnel died in the Spanish-American War. Three hundred and forty-five of them died in combat. The rest - 2,565 men - died of disease: yellow fever in Cuba, typhoid in field camps in Florida and Georgia, dysentery in the Philippines. A war that took ten weeks killed soldiers for months afterward. On July 8, 1898, while the fighting was still going on, Congress passed legislation authorizing something the United States had never before attempted: the repatriation of war dead from foreign soil. Hundreds of bodies were exhumed from Cuban hillsides and shipped home through 1900. Two hundred twenty-six were disinterred in Cuba alone, twenty in Puerto Rico, twenty-four in Hawaii. Most went to Arlington. The granite column with the bronze eagle that marks their burial field, dedicated on May 21, 1902, exists because women in the National Society of the Colonial Dames of America thought a country that brought its dead home should remember why.

Spanish–American War Memorial (Arlington National Cemetery): The First Repatriation

Mon, 01 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Before 1898, when American soldiers died in foreign wars, their bodies stayed where they fell. The dead of the Mexican War lay in Mexican soil. The Confederate and Union dead of the Civil War remained where they were buried, sometimes hastily, on the fields. The decision in 1898 ...

Spanish–American War Memorial (Arlington National Cemetery): The Colonial Dames

Mon, 01 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The National Society of the Colonial Dames of America - a hereditary lineage society for women who could trace ancestry to colonial-era leaders - took up the project of memorializing the Spanish-American War dead in 1900. Their first effort was modest: four Spanish guns captured ...

Spanish–American War Memorial (Arlington National Cemetery): Richard Watson Gilder's Words

Mon, 01 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Lyster and another committee member, Hortense Addison Batre, traveled to the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo in the summer of 1901, where they were struck by the inscriptions over the exhibit-hall doorways. They learned the lines had been written by the poet and Century Magazi...

Spanish–American War Memorial (Arlington National Cemetery): The Memorial

Mon, 01 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

On the afternoon of May 21, 1902, 150 representatives of the Colonial Dames' National Council adjourned their Washington meeting and drove out to Arlington for the four-thirty dedication. Major General John R. Brooke, commander of the U.S. Army's Department of the East, presided....

Spanish–American War Memorial (Arlington National Cemetery): The Missing Book Stand

Mon, 01 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The Record Book Committee, led by Esther Gill Jackson of Maryland, raised an additional 760 dollars to publish the Book of Patriots and designed a stand to display it inside Arlington House. Lois B. Cassatt of Pennsylvania - a relative by marriage of the painter Mary Cassatt - su...