Poplar Grove National Cemetery: Cultural Landscapes Inventory, Petersburg National Battlefield

Auwaerter, John

Poplar Grove National Cemetery, located south of Petersburg in Dinwiddie County, Virginia, was established in 1866 to inter the thousands of fallen Union soldiers from the Petersburg Campaign (1864-1865) and other nearby Civil War battles in southeastern Virginia. Built on the site of the wartime camp of the 50th New York Volunteer Engineers, the cemetery takes its name from the camp’s central feature, a rustic timber building called Poplar Grove Church. The federal government established the cemetery as part of the first systematic national effort to provide burial grounds for those who died in service to the country. The U.S. War Department administered the cemetery and nearby Petersburg National Military Park until 1933, when it transferred both properties to the National Park Service. Poplar Grove is today one of 14 of the nation’s 142 national cemeteries within the National Park System. Accessed along a 1,000-ft. long approach road flanked by working agricultural fields, Poplar Grove National Cemetery contains approximately 6,188 Civil War burials in its brick-wall enclosed eight-acre site. Approximately 35% percent of the burials are marked by white marble headstones inscribed with grave number and the name and company of the soldier. Most of the graves at Poplar Grove contain the remains of unidentified soldiers and are marked by simple square posts inscribed only with the grave number. Poplar Grove remains predominantly a Civil War cemetery with only 60 graves containing veterans of later wars. Closed to new burials in 1957, Poplar Grove still receives reinterment of Civil War remains, the most recent occurring in 2003. Poplar Grove National Cemetery is located on the western edge of the Virginia Tidewater region between Richmond and the North Carolina border, approximately 135 miles south of Washington, D.C. and seventy-file miles west of the Chesapeake Bay. The cemetery is five miles southwest of downtown Petersburg in a transitional rural-suburban area surrounded by second-growth woods, farm fields, and residential development. Poplar Grove is administered as part of Petersburg National Battlefield, a park with multiple components on the outskirts of the city. The cemetery is stop 11 on the park’s Siege Line Tour, which begins at the park’s main area on the east side of Petersburg and extends south and west along the line of Union fortifications that encircled the city. The cemetery is accessed from an approach road that leads across farm fields to the main gates. Within its rectangular boundaries, Poplar Grove features a circular plan with graves and drives radiating out from a central point marked by a flagstaff. Many other historic features remain intact, including a stone Second Empire-style superintendent’s lodge, iron rostrum (bandstand), Colonial Revival-style restroom building and garage, a gun monument (upright cannon), central flagstaff, and a brick inclosure (perimeter) wall with granite and iron entrance gates. The cemetery includes boxwood, magnolia, holly, oak, and loblolly pine that are remnants of a once richly planted landscape.

Poplar Grove National Cemetery: Cultural Landscapes Inventory, Petersburg National Battlefield

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