Grand Army of the Republic Cemetery

This cemetery holds Nevada's Union dead and the memory of the men who saved the Republic. The Grand Army of the Republic—the great fraternal order of Union Civil War veterans—maintained this Reno burial ground for its members, the aging soldiers who had come west after the war to mine, ranch, railroad, and build the new state. As the veterans died through the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, they were laid here with their comrades. The GAR passed into history with its last member. The cemetery endures as a quiet roll call of the Union men who became Nevadans.

What the plaque says

In 1890 General O.M. Mitchel Post #69, Grand Army of the Republic, bought 17 lots in the original Hillside Cemetery for the last resting place for comrades-in-arms during the Civil War, 1861-1865. While friends and relatives of the soldiers maintained the cemetery well, years of neglect and vandalism followed in the twentieth century. Restoration began in 1963 by the Daughters of Union Veterans of the Civil War and other interested citizens of the Reno Area. Among those buried here are members of the Nevada volunteers who served in their own state and neighboring areas of the West from 1861-1866.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Reno — 0.7 mi
  The river crossing the Comstock needed, made a city by the railroad—then reinvented as divorce capital, gambling town, and now tech hub: the Biggest Little City in the World
• Virginia City — 18 mi
  The boomtown that sits on top of the richest silver strike in America—fewer than a thousand people now, on streets built for twenty-five thousand
• Chollar Mine — 19 mi
  A real Comstock silver mine you can still walk into—four hundred feet of original timbered tunnel under C Street, where the work that built a state was done by hand, in the dark
• Sand Harbor — 24 mi
  The crown of Lake Tahoe's Nevada shore—car-sized granite boulders standing in water so clear the boats above them seem to float on air, on a beach the Washoe kept for thousands of summers

More markers nearby

• Grand Army of the Republic Tree — 0.3 mi
• N.C.O. Railroad Depot – 1910 — 0.7 mi
• Frederik Joseph DeLongchamps — 0.9 mi
• Site of Nevada’s First Public Library — 0.9 mi