Arlington House, The Robert E. Lee Memorial
By early 1864, the military cemeteries of Washington, D.C., and Alexandria, Virginia, were rapidly filling with war dead. Quartermaster General of the United States Army Montgomery C. Meigs proposed using of the Arlington estate as a cemetery. United States Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton approved the establishment of a military cemetery on June 15, 1864, creating Arlington National Cemetery. Meigs believed that since Lee had committed treason in deciding to fight against the Union, denying Lee use of the mansion after the war was a rough form of justice. Meigs decided that a large number of burials should occur close to Arlington House to render it unlivable. Officers were to be buried next to the main flower garden south of the house, and the first burial occurred here on May 17. Meigs ordered that additional burials commence immediately on the grounds of Arlington House in mid-June. When Union officers bivouacked in the mansion complained and had the burials temporarily stopped, Meigs countermanded their orders and had another 44 dead officers buried along the southern and eastern sides of the main flower garden within a month.
UA Archives (Upper Arlington, Ohio)
The UA Archives website launched on September 15, 2004, after two years of planning and over 1,500 hours of work. At that time it included historical photographs depicting little known facts about early life in the community. One photograph shows the Marble Cliff Depot, a railroad station known originally as the Scioto Depot. This station house served the Upper Arlington area until the late 1920s and was located on the south side of Fifth Avenue just east of the Pennsylvania tracks, near the present day entrance to First Community Village. Another photograph shows the first teacher and students in Upper Arlington at a time when classes were held in the basement of the home of King Thompson, one of Upper Arlington's founders. Yet another captures a scene from Camp Willis, a military training camp located in Upper Arlington during the community's early development in 1916. Ohio Guardsmen were trained at this camp to defend the United States against cross-border attacks from Pancho Villa's Mexican troops.