Arlington National Cemetery

Arlington National Cemetery covers 639 acres / 2.6 km² of hillside in Arlington County, Virginia, directly across the Potomac River from Washington, D.C., and more than 400,000 service members, veterans and their eligible family members are buried there. It is still an active cemetery. As of 2024 the Army conducted about 27 to 30 funerals each weekday and several more on Saturdays, close to 7,000 burials a year, and the rows of white headstones keep spreading across the slopes.

The setting is a ridge above the Virginia shore of the Potomac. At its crest stands Arlington House, the columned mansion built between 1802 and 1818 by George Washington Parke Custis on high ground that rarely floods and that looks straight across the river to the capital. Below it the land falls in terraces toward the water. Arlington Memorial Bridge crosses the Potomac from the cemetery's edge toward the Lincoln Memorial, tying the hillside into the monumental core of Washington, and the Pentagon lies just to the south, while the three steel spires of the U.S. Air Force Memorial rise on a promontory at the cemetery's southern edge.

The estate passed to the family of Robert E. Lee, Custis's son-in-law, and the federal government took it during the Civil War after a dispute over taxes. The first military burial took place on May 13, 1864, and on June 15, 1864, Quartermaster General Montgomery Meigs formally set aside the grounds as a military cemetery. The first graves were dug close to the mansion, and the cemetery has grown in stages ever since.

The Department of the Army runs the cemetery, which draws 3 to 4 million visitors a year. Its most visited site, the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier at the Memorial Amphitheater, has been guarded by Army sentinels since 1937. Arlington House itself is managed by the National Park Service. The grounds are open every day from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m., and construction on a southern expansion of the cemetery continues in 2026.