Section 10: Crown Hill and the Resting Place of Indiana’s Union Dead

On October 19, 1866, the remains of a Union soldier were carried across Indianapolis from one cemetery to another and lowered into a new grave. He was the first. Within a few weeks he would be joined by several hundred more, and the small parcel of ground that received them — a section inside the recently founded Crown Hill Cemetery — would become the national cemetery where Indiana’s Union dead were at last gathered and given a place of their own.

This is the third post in the Hoosier Union History series’ Memorial Day weekend arc. The first looked at the monument at the center of Indianapolis, which honors the Union soldier in the largest and most general terms a state can manage. The second looked at the regimental stones on the battlefields, which carry the count of a single regiment on a single field. This post follows Indiana’s Union dead to the ground where they were buried one grave at a time — the form of remembrance that does not generalize and does not count, but names.

A city full of soldiers, and nowhere to bury them

Indianapolis was one of the great staging grounds of the Union war effort in the West. Regiments were raised, mustered, and trained there. The sick and the wounded were treated in its military hospitals. The army camps on the edges of the city held thousands of men at a time. Where soldiers are gathered on that scale, soldiers die — and most of them, in the Civil War, died not in battle but of disease, which killed roughly twice as many men in that war as combat did.

Indianapolis met the war’s medical demand with a network of military hospitals, and the scale of sickness was relentless. Camp diseases — typhoid, dysentery, measles, pneumonia — moved through crowded camps of men drawn together from farms and small towns, many of whom had never been exposed to such illnesses before. A soldier was, by the plain statistics of the war, in more danger from a camp than from a battle. The dead those hospitals and camps produced were steady, and they accumulated for four years.

For most of the war, Indianapolis had set aside no ground for those dead. The soldiers who died in the city’s hospitals and camps were buried at Greenlawn Cemetery, the city’s general burial ground, among the civilian dead, with no section reserved and marked as theirs. For the length of the war and for more than a year after it, the capital of a state that had sent the Union more than two hundred thousand men had no cemetery of its own set apart for the soldiers who died on its own soil.

Section 10

That changed in 1866. Crown Hill Cemetery — a large new cemetery incorporated in 1863 on the northwest side of the city — held a parcel that the federal government took up for a national cemetery. The national cemetery occupied Section 10 of Crown Hill: a small piece of ground, about an acre and a half, inside the much larger private cemetery around it.

The work of gathering the dead began that autumn. On October 19, 1866, the first Union soldier was disinterred from Greenlawn and reburied in the national cemetery at Crown Hill. The rest followed quickly. By November 1866 — in a matter of weeks — the remains of 707 soldiers had been moved from Greenlawn and given individual graves in the new ground.

The national cemetery system itself was new. Congress had created it during and immediately after the war, to give the Union’s dead something the country had never before provided its soldiers on this scale: a permanent, government-maintained grave, marked with a uniform government headstone, in ground set apart for that purpose alone. The national cemetery at Crown Hill was Indiana’s place inside that new federal system — the ordered rows, the matching stones, the register of names.

The effort behind Section 10

The gathering of 707 soldiers from Greenlawn was the local instance of something the whole country was doing at once. In the years immediately after the war, the U.S. Army carried out an enormous program of reburial: locating the Union dead where they had fallen or been buried in haste — on battlefields, beside field hospitals, in scattered town cemeteries — disinterring them, and moving them into the new national cemeteries. It was the largest undertaking of its kind the government had ever attempted.

Crown Hill’s Section 10 was Indianapolis’s share of that work. The soldiers moved there had not died on distant fields; they had died in the city itself. But the principle was the same one driving the national program — that a soldier who died in the country’s service should not be left in a borrowed or unmarked grave, mixed in among the civilian dead, but should be gathered with his comrades into ground the government set apart and maintained. The move from Greenlawn to Crown Hill was a small, local keeping of that national promise.

Who lies in the national cemetery

The men buried in the national cemetery at Crown Hill are, for the most part, the soldiers who died in and around Indianapolis — in its hospitals, in its camps, on its hospital trains — rather than on distant battlefields. They are the dead of the war’s long, unglamorous middle: the fever cases, the men who did not survive their wounds after being carried home, the soldiers whose war ended in an Indianapolis hospital ward.

Among them are 217 soldiers of the United States Colored Troops. That detail belongs in this series. Posts 4 and 5 followed Indiana’s Black soldiers and the men of the 28th United States Colored Troops — Hoosiers who had to fight for the right to fight at all. At Crown Hill, 217 of the country’s Black soldiers lie in the same national cemetery, under the same standard government headstones, as the white soldiers buried there. The grave gave them an equality the society that sent them to war had been slow and grudging to grant.

Crown Hill itself grew, over the following century and a half, into one of the largest cemeteries in the United States, and many well-known Hoosiers are buried within its grounds — among them Benjamin Harrison, who served as a Union officer raising and leading the 70th Indiana before he served as the twenty-third president of the United States. But the national cemetery is its own distinct ground: a federal section, an acre and a half, holding the enlisted dead of the Union war. The general and the privates lie in the same cemetery. Only the privates lie in Section 10.

What a cemetery does that a monument cannot

The monument at the center of Indianapolis and the national cemetery at Crown Hill are both acts of Union remembrance, raised by the same generation, a few miles apart. They do opposite things. A monument can be raised to the soldier in the abstract — the artilleryman, the infantryman, the figure that stands for all of them. A grave cannot be dug in the abstract. It needs the name.

That is the particular work the cemetery does. Every grave in Section 10 is one man. Each has a headstone, and each headstone carries, where the record allowed, a name, a regiment, and a date. The cemetery cannot honor the Union soldier as an idea. It can only bury, and mark, and keep — one soldier, and then the next, and then the next, until the rows are full.

The named ground

The Hoosier Union History series follows Indiana’s citizen-soldiers into the war and records what their service cost them. The national cemetery at Crown Hill is where that record becomes most concrete: not a figure on a stone and not a winged statue on a column, but seven hundred and more individual graves, each one a Hoosier soldier with a name, gathered out of a general cemetery and given ground that is theirs.

The weekend arc has moved from the largest form of remembrance to the most particular — from the monument that speaks for the whole state, to the regimental stones that carry the count, to the cemetery that holds the names. One post remains. It is about the day the country set aside to walk into grounds like Section 10 and do the remembering out loud: the first Decoration Day, and how Indiana kept it. The dead earn the page — and a cemetery is the page on which each of them is written down by name.

Sources

• U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, National Cemetery Administration — Crown Hill National Cemetery, history and burial records.
• Crown Hill Heritage Foundation — National Cemeteries at Crown Hill, crownhillhf.org.
• Encyclopedia of Indianapolis — “Crown Hill Cemetery,” indyencyclopedia.org.
• Indiana Archives and Records Administration — “Grateful Remembrance: Memorial Day, Crown Hill Cemetery, and Your Veteran Ancestors,” in.gov/iara.
• This series, Posts 4 and 5 on Indiana’s Black soldiers and the 28th USCT, and Posts 1 through 11, at the blog index.