Landscape Information
Located on the south bank of the Appomattox River, this cemetery was established in 1866 for the reinterment of Civil War soldiers recovered from several nearby temporary hospital burial grounds. The 6.6-acre cemetery contains six burial sections of regularly spaced, linear rows of graves within the western, rectangular portion of the site. A semicircular projection defines the eastern side of the property where the entrance drive, pedestrian gate, superintendent’s lodge, service building, and storage shed are located. The site retains historic landscape features typical of late-nineteenth century national cemeteries, including upright marble headstones, a centralized flagpole, a stone perimeter wall with a wrought-iron pedestrian gate, and mature specimen trees. On axis with the flagpole stands a twenty-foot-tall marble monument, dedicated to the memory of fallen soldiers from the Army of the James. In 1928, the original stone superintendent’s lodge—designed according to plans by Quartermaster General Montgomery Meigs and constructed in 1868—was replaced with the existing Dutch Colonial Revival building based on a Quartermaster General standard plan from the 1920s. In 1941 a neoclassical stone and wrought-iron entry gate was introduced to accommodate automobiles.
Administered by the Department of Veterans Affairs, the cemetery has been closed to new burials since 1971 and contains 5,156 Civil War interments of which 1,423 are unidentified, and 118 are of Confederate soldiers. In 1994 City Point National Cemetery was one of 59 national cemeteries comprising a multiple property listing in the National Register of Historic Places, and a year later it was listed independently.
